Assuming that ICT has not cracked the secret of time-travel, I’m guessing that someone has made a pretty silly error.
BTW, for the unfamiliar, see the often not completely G-rated FAIL blog.
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my.emich creates a “fail blog” worthy submission18 comments to my.emich creates a “fail blog” worthy submission |
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“pretty silly error”? How about “minor typo not deserving this kind of post unless its been really REALLY slow here in the complaint department”.
Obviously the minor typo is “Monday, November 20″ should have read “Monday, November 30″.
Fail blog worthy? Really? That kind of language implies that one is instructed to login to a system which is down for maintenance. Not at all true and jumping up and down with glee at every typo is below what our standards should be.
Um, my seventh grade son looked at that page and said something along the lines of “what kind of moron did this? That’s so fail blog.” So yeah, it’s a minor typo, but a pretty visible one, and one that I would assume would be easy to fix. Whoever is in charge of this sort of thing must be too lazy or too careless. Besides, it isn’t entirely clear to me that this automatically means that they must have meant the Monday after break. For all I know, they meant November 20, 2010.
If you want a real complaint, how about scheduling this maintenance during a weekend when a lot of our students try to schedule classes for the winter term?
At universities, people are taught to proof read and to correct errors, and to verify the accuracy of statements before they are made public. These behaviors and standards are central to what a university exists for. So I must agree with Sitedad on this — and he’s entirely correct in saying that the actual intended date isn’t “entirely” or “automatically” clear. Few typos involving dates are obvious to the reader, hence the vital importance of proof reading. (We teach that skill in some classes here.)
And, there’s been a fun little betting pool on how long this embarrassing error will stand uncorrected. Newcomers to EMU who were in the betting pool tended to bet it’d be noticed and corrected right away. Old timers at EMU tended to bet that it’d take days, or never be corrected or publicly acknowledged.
Just as a publication filled with typos might still be perfectly readable, even if it doesn’t look professional, a computer system’s log in site that carries a clearly crazy wrong and misleading date, for a period of days, looks quite unprofessional. It is unprofessional, no matter how you slice it.
how much longer do you think the misspelled no smoking (“pray harold”) signs will be left up outside the SE entrance of PH?
Yeah, only two problems with that, emu guy. The building is called Pray-Harrold with two Rs, not Harold. The building is named after two people, one with the last name of “Pray” and the other “Harrold.” And second, as this post proves, these signs spelled the name of the builing correctly.
Gotta go with jmo. If we apply the same standard to those who jump with glee, then might someone also be “fail blog” worthy for referring to IT as ICT? There was a name chang some time ago.
People should also be *very* careful when sanctimoniously pontificating about typos and proofreading–especially when their own posts/comments indicate a need for the very same things.
And while maintenance can be inconvenient for some at times, breakdowns and repair inconvenience everyone. I much prefer the former over the latter.
Heh. You said “There was a name chang some time ago.” Fail comment.
I dunno; it is true that this error is not that big of a deal, but me thinks my colleagues in IT/ICT/DoIT!/Doh! doth protests too much.
sd: Exactly my point — I regret I wasn’t able to make it as well as I would wish. The correct name for the building the English Department is housed in is “Pray-Harrold,” not the “Pray Harold” as currently displayed on four signs right outside its SE door. Go look..
D’oh!
Umm…
Unless you are thinking of a different sign?
They run a 24/7 operation. For the most part, things just work.
Institutionally, we take that level of IT performance for granted. Yet if students (or faculty) operate with that level of efficiency/competence it’s prolonged multiple orgasm time for a stellar performance.
I think they get tired of hearing complaints with nary a compliment–or even a “Thank You”to balance it out. If you know who to contact (and IT should try to be a bit more proactive about this), mistakes and problems get resolved quickly. Many “problems” that I contact IT about turn out to be DOH! type errors on my part.
Good grief. From the above paper sign, exit the building. Go south 30 feet. Turn around. Look at Pray-Harrold. Observe the metal sign (there are four) that says, “no smoking beyond this point – designated non-smoking entry for pray harold”
Ah-ha! You mean this sign:
Ouch, that is bad. I think some new signage is in order….
Yes!
I need a camera.
This has gotten to a point of pleasant silliness, but I am pedantic enough to note the obvious: Nothing anyone posts on emutalk is something they’re doing as professionals, as part of our job responsibilities, with supervisors to whom we are accountable for EMUTalk posts; so typos here aren’t as damning as ones made in official capacities by paid professionals with supervisors. Get it? Kind of like a typo in an email to a friend isn’t the same as one in a paper handed in for a class.
And public typos that don’t create confusion are less problematic than those, like getting dates wrong, that do create confusion. And the Pray-Harrold signs? So what? What confusion does the missing dash involve? yes, there’s an error made in some sign shop – should they toss out the sign and spend money on a new one? That kind of mistake is minor compared to an online error that takes no labor to fix besides noticing the error.
Who said that the IT people aren’t hard working? Not me, nor anyone on this tread. That’s a straw man argument, entirely irrelevant to whether the error that sparked this discussion was or was not unprofessional.
Gipper, I agree with your first paragraph, but not so much with your second. I’m surprised that I hadn’t noticed the mistake on the “Pray Harold” sign, though it wasn’t my job to make sure it was correct– I presume that was someone in the physical plant. But if I was in charge, I’d say “hey, this sign needs to be replaced” because it’s wrong. If you saw a stop sign that said “STIP” or a construction sign that said “WIRK ZONE AHED,” you’d probably understand the message, but you’d probably also think “they ought to fix that sign.”
As for your points in the third paragraph: I’m not saying that the IT people aren’t hard-working and over-burdened like every other staff and faculty person at EMU. But the error that someone made with this date snafu on my.emich certainly looks unprofessional and would not have been hard at all to fix.
That kind of thing has driven me nuts ever since I started here. I have seen very few error free publications/websites etc. come out of EMU.
(Another noteworthy typo…check on the ground floor of Pease by the loading dock sometime. Some of the placards by the elevator state that you may not smoke because the elevator smoke detectors are “effected.”)
This stuff is relatively minor, but being a university we should at least hold each other accountable and take the responsibility to correct our mistakes.
On another topic, what’s up with the unprofessional mishmash of design schemes on the EMU website? There’s absolutely no flow from section to section. It seems like every page could have the same menu bar at least.
/rant
cobstudent:
Stupid typos, grammatical errors, unreadable, ambiguous, and incorrect text in official EMU places/publications have driven me nuts too. It is *not* a consolation that I have seen similar (though not as endemic) errors elsewhere.
This is NOT minor. It’s shoddy and affirms shoddiness.
EMU website – I agree.
Even given the above rant by me, I do think EMU is a terrific opportunity to students. It can offer a premier (I mean *world-class*) education (if courses are carefully selected – a constraint true for every university). It does drive me nuts, though, when I walk past a lecture hall and see the prof has written “petty burgeois” on the board. Argh!.