Nine Minutes!

[aggienaut]

   Today I turned in the OPEC topic synopsis I'd been working on. At about five pages, its the longest synopsis I've ever written.

...
   It took them NINE MINUTES from the time I sent them the synopsis to fire me.

...
   Nine minutes! Thats damn fast. But yeah, they called nine minutes later, the topic synopsis apparently wasn't long enough.


   Technically they didn't fire me though. It was more like "it needs to be longer" "well I'm definitely not making it longer" "well, we really need it to be longer" "well then you need to hire someone else." So technically I think I quit while politely telling them to shove it. It felt quite rewarding actually.
   Incidentally, I complained about how silly I think nine page topic synopsii about two weeks ago. The purpose of the papers is so give a brief overview of the topic, not do the delegates research for them. In this case, I could come up with five pages of overview, but if I wrote any more I'd cross the line into doing delegates research for them, and I'm just not going to drink that punch.


   Anyway, here is the offending synopsis, for you to judge yourself. Its still a next-to-final draft -- if they hadn't fired me I'd have inserted more citations (which I don't usually do until the end) and wrapped up the very end of it better, but neither of those things apparently contributed to their displeasure.


   Who needs AMWEST anyway?

Comments

Re: Just Because Nat'ls Does It

[thepeoplesmp.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I do think its ridiculous that conferences are in this sort of academic-ness competition with each other. I'm told that for our school's (high school) conference this spring, our sg wants us to write 15 page background guides. What good does it do for anyone to have students read something that large and then tell them to go do research on top of it? ugh.

Re: Just Because Nat'ls Does It

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

15 pages! Ridiculous!!! Can I tell your SG to shove it? This is getting ridiculous. They are completely losing sight of the purpose of a background guide.

And there's no way in hell the high school students are going to read all 15 pages.

Re: Just Because Nat'ls Does It

[thepeoplesmp.livejournal.com]

I remember [back in my day] when background guides were one page, single spaced for all three topics for a committee. And they often reused them from year to year.

Re: Just Because Nat'ls Does It

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

indeed. I think two pages per topic is about optimum.