Current mood:

amused

A slice of our government in action
Yesterday I got an email from the EPA. They were contacting former EPA Fellows (read: they gave me money in graduate school) looking for information on what we've been up to, what we've contributed to environmental R&D, etc. The email pleaded with recipients to please go to a certain website and fill out information online so they can prove to Congress how effective their program is.

Here's the funny bit. The email had *SEVEN* attachments designed to help recipients fill out the simple online form. How hard could it be? So, skipping the attachments, I went straight to the website.

Screen 1: "Enter your GAD#:"

Huh? Checking the attachments, my GAD# was the number assigned to my fellowship award. Ahem... it's been 10 years. What kind of packrat do they think I am? The only help in the seven attachments for this was "If you don't know your GAD#, contact your Project Officer." Again, it's been *ten* years! No phone number, no name, no nothing in the seven attachments. Game over.

Sure, I could email the original emailer back (who is a poor summer intern assigned to this crap), get either my GAD# or my Project Officer contact info and chase all this down, but in looking through the seven attachments, which mainly consisted of screenshots of what you'd see anyway and "helpful" things like how to write a short desciption of your current work (note, this is being sent to PhDs, mind you), it became clear the information gathering is heavily slanted toward people who stayed in academia. I'm a corporate hound, I don't have scholarly publications to speak of, a list of awards, proposals written and grants received. So, there's really nothing compelling here to entice me to try to participate further.

But how you can send an email with seven useless attachments and create an optional participation process that most people can't complete without going out of their way to get more information... oh wait... we're talking about the government.