So I was forwarded a link to a paper on the Educause web site, a paper that I would like to read as it has some bearing on a project I’m working on. Educause is a nonprofit group that does work relating to IT in higher education, and my institution is a member. My institution also has a (paid) subscription to Educause’s research archive.
The research in question is, so far as I know, of the “market” rather than “scientific” variety, so I’ll leave out the bitching about the lack of open access, at least for now. In any case, I have a legitimate right to access the research materials.
The way they verify this is by making me register at the site. Ok, fine, nothing I haven’t done a million times before. The very first thing they ask for is my email address. This is smart because, if I put in a (something)@uiowa.edu address, they can send me an email with a link that contains a one-time-use, expiring key, which I will then click, verifying that the @uiowa.edu address is mine, and voila! They will know I belong to the University of Iowa.
The second screen asks for some more info (name, title, blah blah). Ok, fine, they can have whatever they want. I click “Submit”. And get the following gem in return:
Can’t create a profile for you
We are unable to create a profile for you because you are not in our database. We will add you to our database within one business day, and you will receive an e-mail when you can come back and create your profile.
Thank you!
The hell? Who designed this thing? Someone doing pro-bono work, I hope.
In the bottom right-hand corner is a shiny button that reads, “webaward winner”. I click it. The Educause site is the proud owner of a 2005 Webaward, “FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT”, from “THE WEB MARKETING ASSOCIATION”. This tells you everything you need to know about industry awards, not to mention people who write in all caps.
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I like my job, but it does have its hazards. For example, repeatedly saying the phrase “enterprise wiki” can leave you feeling pretty foolish.
I gave myself something much better to feel foolish about this week, though. I should be writing this post from a Ramada in Guelph, Ontario, where a users’ group conference for a certain piece of software is set to begin tomorrow. Several colleagues, including my boss, are there.
But I am not; I am sitting at home twiddling my thumbs. Because I lost my birth certificate, without which I cannot prove my U.S. citizenship, without which I cannot even board the plane, as a supervisor in NWA’s international bookings department was at pains to point out.
I lost my %$&*# birth certificate!
A simple driver’s license may be all that’s needed to cross the border by car, but the requirements for air travel are more stringent, and no alternative documentation is accepted.
Oh, ok, fine, yes, a passport would do as well. I don’t have a passport. If I had been with-it enough to go out and get myself a passport when we first planned this trip, I would not be typing this in Iowa, and not just because I could take the passport and leave the birth certificate behind; a birth certificate is needed when applying for a passport, and I would have learned it was missing with plenty of time to spare.
Or, you know, if I had checked on the location of the birth certificate a few days earlier, I would have had enough time to get a replacement. Arizona offers an expedited document retrieval service, for which I applied as soon as I realized the problem, but I would have had to have been very lucky for it to arrive in time. I wasn’t that lucky. It will probably show up at my door at 8:00 A.M. Monday morning.
The icing on the cake is that I was supposed to give a presentation at the conference, first thing tomorrow morning, in fact. So I didn’t just embarrass myself by making a ridiculous mistake, but I also failed to meet a very public committment that I had volunteered for. Boy, have I wished for the past little while that I could dig a hole to crawl into and hide. At least I was able to give the conference organizers a few days’ notice.
We keep important documents such as this in carefully labelled files; Holly’s birth certificate is right where it belongs, as is Daphne’s, as are social security cards, insurance info, mortgage stuff, etc. Not my birth certificate, though. Lesson learned: rent a safe deposit box.
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