23 Jan 2009

Last night while at work, I was listening to a podcast on the iPod from The Diane Rhem Show on NPR. Ever since I got my first iPod I have become a podcast junkie.

During the time I was a truck Driver I used to listen to NPR almost exclusively during the day. Mainly it was for the news, politics, and people who populate the various shows. I even went so far as to be one of the very first people to get Sirius satellite radio because they had NPR programming. I bought my first satellite system within 3 weeks of their launch and I still have the original unit somewhere in the house. And I have been a loyal Sirius satellite customer ever since.

I’m not supposed to be listening to an iPod at work, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why. At work I have to wear hearing protection, usually in the form of ear plugs. But when I want to listen to my iPod, I put in the ear buds and then put earmuffs on over top of them. That way I block out all the noise and I don’t have to crank up the volume on the iPod. It is also much better at blocking out noise than simple ear plugs are, but I’m told not to wear the earmuffs because I bought them and not the company. And the HR person seems to think that piping music into your ears is somehow going to damage your hearing, even though I’ve explained to her how I do it. It’s no louder at work than it is if I was sitting on the couch here at home. Because the earmuffs keep out sound and keep IN sound too.

But… on second shift the boss doesn’t really care. To tell the truth, he doesn’t seem to care much about anything. As long as you show up, he’s pretty much fine with it.

So ever since I’ve been on second shift, I’ve been getting podcasts from iTunes and listening to them at work. I get several podcast every day and I usually will download 5-7 hours of broadcasting every night. Then I will go through it all and dump anything that I have heard before, or has been covered in a different program.

Sunday nights are the best though, because I get several humorous shows that are weekend only broadcasts. I find myself laughing out loud and people at work looking at me strange.  

Well, back to the original story…

“Always on” is a book by Naomi Baron and it talks about how the written word has been changed by technology and on-line communications. Everything from “LOL” and “emoticons” are creeping into our written language. Lack of punctuation, poor spelling, no capitalization, and abbreviations, all of this has crept into doctoral thesis, papers written for college level English majors, even corporate letters to shareholders.

A lot of this has to do with text messaging. Using shortened forms of words to save on text charges are getting into everyday usage.

But finally, here’s my point. I have a pet peeve with all of this. When I write here, I try very hard to write as though I am talking to you. When I text my wife, I adopt shortened words, even though I have a full QWERTY keyboard on my phone and I have unlimited text messaging on my plan. When I write emails I write very formally, as if I were writing it by hand.  To each medium I write appropriately.

As for spelling, it kills me to read posts and emails with abbreviations and LOL and ;) emoticons. That’s why I use the (parentheses) so much. If I want to say something as an aside, that’s the proper way to do it. At least if I remember correctly from so many years ago. Who knows, I may be very wrong about this. Also it bothers me to no end when I screw up and misspell a word or accidently use a different word than the one I intended. Excellent example is I just re-read this paragraph and I wrote “work” instead of “word” at one point. Spell-check won’t pick that one out for you!

My sister is horrible about this (sorry sis!). She doesn’t use punctuation, capitalization or correct spelling or even using paragraphs to spread out the different topics in emails. It looks like one huge run-on sentence. So I read it several times just trying to separate the words into coherent thoughts before I can even begin to understand what has been written to me.

Did you know that job application websites deliberately do not have spell-check or grammar-check?  The people who set up these sites want to know if you can spell, punctuate, and write correctly without the help of a computer.  There are ways around that, but I think if you are trying to be professional about something, maybe you should take the extra effort and do it right!

I dunno, I just wanted to rant about this… and yes I wrote “dunno” deliberately!

I’m Alive… So Far…