Reference Saga

Phil under the bonnet.

About a month ago my mate Phil asked me to write him a reference for a job he's applying for in Afghanistan. Because I've been pre-occupied with the camp I hadn't done it and he was getting a little anxious, based on the frequency and tone of his emails asking how I was going with it. It was a fill in the blanks/respond to the questions type of reference, not just the typical one page of attributes and qualities I'm used to providing for students etc. Finally yesterday I sat down to do the job. It took a few hours of thought and word-smithing spread over the day but I finished it by late afternoon. I proof-read it and printed out a copy then attached it to an email and sent it off into the cybersphere and ticked it off my list of things to do in the holidays. I was dismayed then to discover an email from Phil this morning saying it had not arrived, or rather, that the template had arrived but all my text was nowhere to be found! Hmm! That's a nuisance, I wonder what happened to it? No problem I thought, I saved a copy of it I'll send it again. Hmm! No I won't! It wasn't there!! Yes the template was there but no, the four pages of reference material were not! Not in any of the three versions I could find of it on the computer! Gone, vanished, disappeared, vamoosed, not to be found!!! Thank God I had printed out a copy of it because that is the only record that remains of the whole episode! I scanned it, and sent it off to Phil as Jpegs, 4 separate pages due to the size of the file and the slowness of my emails when I attach anything more than a paragraph of text! The good news is he appears to have received it, though how useful it will be as a series of jpegs comparred to a Word doc is anybody'e guess, but I was just rejoicing that I didn't have to type the whole thing again. (The typing isn't that big a deal, it's the thinking of all the stuff I said in the first place that would have taxed me.) On the up side, Phil is apparently quite taken with one of my new paintings, Silver Bark, and we have negotiated a deal where he gets the painting in exchange for making me some frames. The age of bartering is alive and well.



Phil and Julie's 2 kids, Pieta and Elijah