further random questions from the newly-unemployed

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Derek D. Martin writes:
| At some point hitherto, Scott Prive hath spake thusly:
| > This is a good point for everyone, and there's another reason for
| > sending Microsoft formats (even if *not* requested): Document
| > associations don't always work in Windows, and even if they do
| > there's no guarantee they display as intended. Definitely don't send
| > the document without an extension, and proof the document in MS Word
| > for Windows.
|
| This makes another assumption that I find extremely irritating...
| What if I don't have access to Microsoft Word?  As it happens, I do
| now (it came with the laptop I'm typing this on -- though that's no
| guarantee -- normally I blow away any MS partitions before I install
| Linux), but for a very long time, I didn't.  In the past, if I needed
| to use Word for something, I'd have had to borrow a coworker's PC
| (mine ran Linux, or Solaris before that (ultrasparc, not a PC)).
| Proofing your resume is not the sort of thing you want to be doing on
| an associate's system...

What I've found generally works is to tell them  that  Bill
Gates  doesn't like to share the secrets of things like the
Word format with the likes of us  unix/linux  geeks,  so  I
don't  have  any software that can produce a Word doc.  The
response is usually along the lines  of  "Oh,  yeah;  plain
text  will be fine." Occasionally I do get a question in as
to why they're requesting a proprietary MS format when they
say  they're looking for unix experts.  Most of them didn't
know that Word was proprietary, of course.

Sometimes I've gotten them into a discussion of the problem
of "deleted" text in Word docs that is still there. This is
something that they usually haven't heard of, and they  get
rather  worried when I describe it.  Rightly so, of course,
since they should wonder what sort of hidden text they  are
sending out when they email a Word doc.

(I wonder if Open Office solves this problem? It should, of
course, if only to save the bandwidth. And nobody needs the
surprise of finding that fragments of other  messages  have
been  sent  out  to  someone whose mail reader displays the
"deleted" text.)