Please Hire Me

I got up at 6:30 a.m. this morning to finish writing/revising my cover letter and resume for Routledge. I did manage to successfully deposit the finished product in the mailbox before I left for work, but I also discovered that my printer is obsessively determined to prevent me from getting hired. It took me about 20 minutes to finish the actual writing/revising but I spent the next hour trying to print the darn thing. First my printer somehow made all the bullets next to my supposedly emphasized points disappear. When I fixed that, it suddenly converted my "smart quotes" to huge black boxes. I replaced them with straight quotes and reprinted the thing all over again, only to find that now suddenly my dashes were printing out as huge black boxes instead. This irritated me a whole lot because I really like dash characters and I hate having to substitute un ugly pair of hyphens for them, but after numerous attempts to make my printer act sane again, I decided it wasn't beneficial to keep arguing with it since I really wanted to deposit the finished product in the mailbox already. In the midst of all this, by the way, I also discovered that whenever I close out of a document and reopen it, Lotus WordPro gets the brilliant idea that it would be really cool to uninstall the Times New Roman font, so when I reopen my resume it shows up all in a substitute font like Wingdings. (It also seems to decide that instead of there being a Times New Roman font, there's a TmsRmn font instead, which in reality there isn't, if you look in my Windows Fonts folder for it . . . as far as I can tell, the problem seems to be a weird glitch in Lotus rather than anything wrong with my actual fonts.) Luckily, however, closing Lotus WordPro entirely and reopening the whole program seems to convince it to reinstall my font, so I just ended up having to exit the whole program anytime I wanted to reopen the document and get rid of a new unexpected huge black box.

I was by this time absolutely convinced that my printer has it in for me, since it's not hard to figure out that when you're applying for a job as an editor and you send in a resume with black boxes printed in the place of characters, you're not going to get hired. My printer also suddenly developed a weird problem with long white lines through its letters, which caused me to consider emailing the document to my workplace and printing it out here on my lunch break, but that would have meant converting it all to MS Word, which would most likely entail a whole new round of disappearing bullets and garbage characters, besides which the printers here are quite possibly older than I am (seriously: we have a dot-matrix one that's four feet tall, three feet wide, two feet deep and makes so much noise you can hear it all over the building—I like to think of it as the world's only vacuum tube computer printer ever, designed perhaps for printing information from slide rules). Eventually I decided that although letting huge black boxes slip through onto my resume would relect badly upon my editing skills, letting long white lines through the letters slip through is probably excusable. Maybe they'll feel sorry for me and decide I need a real salary?

Anyway, I'm glad it's done. Maybe they'll even read this? Hi, Prospective Employers! Please don't judge my editing skills on the content of this journal, because I never place enough importance on it to bother reading any of my entries after finishing them and I don't have a spell check function conveniently available—and besides, you know how we editors are, we're used to getting paid for our editing, so when we're not paid we can't be bothered to edit a thing . . .

The above has been a run-on sentence. Please disregard it and hire me anyway. Thank you.

Sertoli Cells

From Dictionary of the Future, by Faith Popcorn and Adam Hanft:

Sertoli Cells — cells located in the testes that are being studied for their ability to prevent damage in stroke victims. The first step was to prove, in vitro, that sertoli cells protected brain cells from dying after the effects of a stroke were simulated. It worked. Next, rats injected with sertoli cells within a day of a stroke were found to have less damage, and fewer movement handicaps[,] than rats that were untreated. Further research needs to be done, but an encouraging start has been made. Additional good news: because sertoli cells don't trigger an immune response, they can be used in both women and men.

Wow, old-fashioned sex is really being outdone these days. Elderly couples will now curl up to go to sleep in each other's arms, happy in the romantic knowledge that the testicular cells of one partner have been implanted right into the other partner's brain. Whose testicular cells do you want implanted in your brain?