Distractions and Diversions (Cecilia Peartree)

Autumn rainbow from the window

I very nearly forgot about my post this month, because the time had gone so quickly since the last one. This was partly because of several family birthdays and an unexpected babysitting opportunity, but also because my voluntary role as secretary to a local committee has expanded into other areas since the organisation moved to new premises.

One aspect of the expansion is that our new place has a built-in reception area which almost cries out for someone to man it during opening hours, but the existing very small staff don't have time to do this and we can't afford to employ anyone else at the moment, so volunteers have been recruited and I've unwisely said I would act as an emergency back-up. It's quite difficult to tell exactly how much work will be needed at each session, but what I've found during the few times I've been acting as receptionist is that generally activity groups that mainly consist of women (knitters, crafters, even parent and baby groups) look after themselves and hardly ever ask questions, whereas some of the members of the two men's groups, whom I had better not identify, can never remember where their signing-in sheet is, or whether they're allowed to park in the car park, and everything gets unnecessarily complicated. Coincidentally this is quite consistent with the way things happen in my household, where I've traditionally been the only person who can ever find anything or remember what days the various bins go out.

I didn't think I would take to being on reception duty, but actually it's quite nice to see the organisation in action as I've worked behind the scenes in it for so long, and I enjoy answering people's questions as long as I have a rough idea of the right answers!

Another thing I've been doing, this time as part of my secretarial role, is tidying up a huge application form for funding that other people have been completing. Admittedly the form itself is not conducive to the simple formatting of text, but as someone who works with documents a lot, I've had to suspend my horror at some of the sights I've seen during this task. 

(None of them are quite as bad as my notes shown here though)

Scruffy notes - no need for fonts or punctuation here!

First of all, fonts. Now, I prefer to write my novels in 11 point Times New Roman  with the first line of each paragraph indented and no spaces between paragraphs. It doesn't necessarily look very nice but using the same font every time means I don't get distracted by it. It's just there, part of the background. However, because multiple people have contributed to the above-mentioned application, and have pasted their efforts straight into the document in whatever font they've used to draft their part, on my first read-through I found examples of about five different fonts. I tidied them up once, and at the end of last week received another draft of the full thing, and somehow the contributors had found five new fonts to add to it, including one that had letters outlined in dark blue. Actually it isn't hard to change them once you've found them - I just dread them adding yet more fonts after I've finished with it this time.

Worse even than this is the punctuation. I can hardly believe this but there are people out there who have never heard of hyphens! And someone who likes to type a space before a full stop instead of after it - I can almost identify this person's contribution from this particular idiosyncrasy. I think this might actually be partly caused by a problem with the space bar, because it's accompanied by the tendency to add an extra space between words. And don't even mention the use of apostrophes.

Maybe I'm overreacting to this because of spending so much time writing, but I can't help feeling something has gone badly wrong with the education system or something if so many different people have problems with this kind of thing. Or maybe it's just that people have got too used to communicating online and via text message, although needless to say I even try to use correct punctuation for these. The trouble is that essentially I think there's a purpose in most kinds of punctuation and people like me don't just use it for fun but to add a bit more clarity to our writing. There may not be enough people who think like this to save it from extinction, however!