Lots of goofy stuff happens at work. All the time. I almost never post about it, though. 'Cause that's work and this isn't. However, I noticed something today that was too good to pass up. One of the things I do for the professors I work for is prepare Powerpoint presentations for talks they give at conferences and such. One of the professors usually starts with something, prints it out, marks it up with a red pen, and then sends the whole thing to me to clean up. I got a set of printed slides from him yesterday and have been going through them. One set of slides came from one of his grad students. A student I don't really know. The professor inserted the grad student's illustrations and wanted to cite the student's thesis on the slide (note the text in the lower right-hand corner):

There were three such slides in a row. The student's name was spelled differently on each slide. As I said, I don't really know the student and had no idea what his last name really was. So, I looked him up in the UT directory. Guess what? All three spellings were wrong:

That last spelling (which I wrote in pencil on the last slide) is the correct spelling according to the directory. That's pretty impressive, doncha think? Three attempts, doubtlessly made within 4 or 5 minutes of each other, and every one of them wrong. Again I say: impressive. Heh.

Before I get any quibbles: yes, I know. I do post from the Campus Watch reports all the time. Technically, those are from my workplace. But, they're always (well, 99 times out of 100) about people I don't know so they don't really count as posts about my work. Okay? Okay.

Posted on May 4, 2006 by Joanna