I have no application form and I must rant

[Lee Einer]

For what it's worth, I encountered the same problem when I applied with 
TriWest. Their application was in .doc format and so tarted up with 
borders, boxes, etc that it would not convert cleanly with any of the 
Linux word processing apps at my disposal. My solution was to sign up 
for a free trial of Adobe's online pdf converter, and use it to convert 
the file to pdf format. It worked flawlessly. I then called their HR 
department, and explained that many users, including myself, use office 
suites other than MS, and will have problems with the .doc format, but 
that I had converted their file to a format which anybody could print 
out regardless of their OS or office suite, and offered to e-mail it to 
them as a resource they could use in the future. The HR rep was very 
appreciative, and rightly so; I had not ranted or complained, but rather 
had identified a solution to a technical problem, did the work myself, 
and given them a tool which they could use in the future.



Lee Einer

Craig White wrote:

>On Thu, 2003-01-30 at 15:06, Michelle Lowman wrote:
>
>>I know this topic came up at the county meeting, but I'm having a
>>problem with proprietary document formats being used by MCCCD. They have
>>several faculty positions listed, and I would like to apply for them,
>>but the application on the website is in .doc format, and it is
>>thoroughly macro-ridden, so I can't open it in either OpenOffice or
>>Abiword without it being mangled.
>>
>>I asked Employee Services if they could email me an .html or .rtf
>>version, and they say it goes against policy to email applications (even
>>blank ones -- go figure.)
>>
>>Three of these positions close tomorrow, which means I can't apply for
>>them because I can't get the form by then. They do have an online
>>application form, but if I remember right (I haven't looked at it in a
>>while) that thing is a nightmare. It looks like I'll have to just try to
>>do it that way, and I'll have to apply for the other positions next week
>>between classes on one of the MS machines at PC. Dammit. 
>>
>>OK, rant over. Any other thoughts on this?
>>
>-----
>I would contact personnel and tell them exactly this and suggest that
>their system, though obviously well intentioned is a problem for people
>not owning Microsoft Word. It's borderline discriminatory.
>
>Craig
>
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