Sorry. “There’s people” is correct: “there’s money, there’s bread, there’s people”. Uncountable.
But “there are people” is also correct: you can treat the word “people” as either a “countable” or “uncountable”. Don’t you just love optional grammar? Who said English was hard? (Oh wait, I say that every time I run into a word I have no idea how to pronounce)
And you can’t fire the OP: he already fired himself.
I’m completely unable to have a sign in front of me and not read it. Sony Entertainment Television down here often gets this dumb error where the same CC shows constantly, it simply doesn’t change or go away at any time. You’re watching Princess Bride and the screen says “do or do not, there is no try”. You’re watching ads for Kellogg’s in Spanish and the screen says “do or do not, there is no try”. I just can’t watch SET when it’s like that.
Once it started on a Saturday and didn’t get fixed until next Tuesday.
For me, that’s 19 letters and a period if I abbreviate the firstname. 24 if I don’t. Firstname is 4 words; lastname is 3. And I’m not including my second lastname (which in Spain would actually be required, if you want my full legal name).
Anybody with a name like mine should never use that format, at least not without an apology.
Do you hyphenate anal retentive? :rolleyes: 
Here in the US, the military is always running ads about how people can learn valuable career knowledge even if they only serve one tour or duty. Besides, anyone who has worked retail understands the primal urge to mow down dumbass customers with a machine gun now and again.
I’m not deaf, and my captioning (or subtitling, depending on what I’m watching) is on all the time. The sound is on all the time, too. Why wouldn’t it be? You don’t have to turn off the sound to turn on the captions, you know.
Closed captioning (not “close” captioning, ivylass) makes it easier to follow what’s happening, especially when there’s a lot of ambient noise. When I watch something without captions, I feel like I’m missing a lot of the dialog.
:rolleyes: Overgeneralize much? Closed captioning on American broadcast television went from being optional in 1999 to being mandatory on all new programming in 2006. It’s tough to ramp up an industry that fast, and many underqualified people (like Sean Factotum’s sister, apparently) have been brought in to handle the load. Sure, there are some egregiously bad captions, but I think your statement is ridiculous. You have no idea how much time and effort the main players in captioning put into quality control.
There are two completely different types of captioning.
Online captioning is typically performed in realtime by people trained to write at very high speeds (upwards of 250 words per minute) on stenotype keyboards. This is used for live shows like news and sports. Although they may get scripts of parts of the show, they hear most of the broadcast at the same time the viewer does (hence the delay between the sound and the captions on live programs). The script just helps them to find spellings–although scripts are often riddled with spelling mistakes.
Offline captions are prepared in a studio. The “people making the big bucks” may not be getting minimum wage, but they certainly aren’t getting rich. Many shows have scripts, but the final edited show doesn’t follow the script very well. The post-production folks don’t go back and change the script every time they edit out a scene or change some dialog. It’s often faster to create the captions from scratch than it is to use the script, especially given the aforementioned spelling and punctuation mistakes in many scripts. Offline captioners frequently work under tight deadlines, trying to create the captions while the post crew are still making changes. That’s why you’ll sometimes see a caption that says one song is playing while you’re hearing a different one: they swapped songs at the last minute and never told the captioner.
As a side note, many of the “captioning errors” you see are transmission-related problems. The CC system we use on North American NTSC (analog) television is not very robust. It doesn’t take much signal jiggling to blow out part of a caption, making it look like the captioner made a typo.
Then your sister is in the wrong job. A captioner should have the spelling skills of a professional copyeditor or proofreader. The big captioning firms have QC departments to check the quality of the outgoing work, but as you mentioned, time constraints often prevent complete checks.
In California, the vast majority of spoken Spanish is in the Mexican dialect. People from Spain are said to speak “Castellano” rather than “Espanol.” I used to date a Mexican girl who told me she had difficulty conversing with Cubans because “their accent was so strong.”
Yeah, you’ll rue the run, Duffer. Yes, you will. Well? Go ahead! Start ruing! 
I Burning You Dong!
Well, I’m all over the OP. I get these kinds of brain-dead missives all the time, and feel compelled to share this especially silly example that was recently forwarded to me from our webmaster:
> Sent: Monday, March 27, 2006 11:33 PM
> To: GR - Webmaster - Users
> Subject: Web Site Contact
>
> Hello i am intrested in getting a job with you. But i was wondering will
> you train me to be a mud logger. I am somewhat fumiler with the work in
> the mud logging just haven’t been trained right and no company wants to
> hire me cos i don’t have much train. I have helped out with other mud
> loggers worked with my husband out in the field what I know i have tot
> myself but i am very intrested in doing the work and doing the best i can
> do. thank you for your time <Name deleted>.
No resume attached, no indication of where the person in question might be located. A major component of the job is writing clear, understandable geological reports. Dearest, the reason no one wants to hire you is not cos you don’t have much train, it’s because you come off as a complete and utter maroon.
I got a resume today from someone who mis-spelled “co-starred.”
He spelled it “Cost Starred.”
:smack:
I found today one that slipped through the cracks. One of her “skillsets” is “Cashless”. Her public profile states “Cash List.” Doesn’t sound major, maybe, but in my company that’s as glaring a mistake as an ER doctor wearing a nametag showing “Jane Doe, CPA”.
Embarrassing, really.
Perhaps because their version of Microsoft Word does not come with an English-language dictionary and grammar checker. I used to get a lot of resumes from foreign applicants; it’s unreasonable to assume that the Hungarian edition of Microsoft Office includes writing tools for anything other than Hungarian.
And what kind of laboratory position are you recruiting for? Is it one where the candidates need to write up lab reports in English? If not, then why do you care if they make spelling or grammar mistakes? Even if so, then is lack of English proficiency really grounds for rejection? I’d be more interested in the applicant’s ability to conduct research and use lab equipment. At the last (German) research lab I worked at, there was a foreign applicant who couldn’t write well in German. The employer didn’t care; they wanted to know if he could do research. And he could, so they hired him, and were glad they did. He authored more peer-reviewed journal and conference papers than anyone else in the department, bar one insanely prolific colleague. The German-language papers he wrote were corrected for grammar by his colleagues or by the department’s secretary. This small extra effort was justified by the quality of the papers he produced.
This might be Microsoft Word’s problem, not the applicant’s (especially if you require resume submissions to be in MS-Word). Word is notorious for reformatting documents on different computers, so it’s entirely possible that it surreptitiously inserted extra space at the end of the document. In some cases Word will even produce a final blank page that can’t be deleted. If you insist that candidates send you electronic resumes that print out exactly as the author intended, you should be asking them to send you PDFs, which, unlike word processor documents, are guaranteed to preserve formatting. If you’re just reading the resumes on the screen, though, why the fork do you care if there are some newlines at the end of the document?
Or you could ask for the document to be sent as an RTF if you don’t like PDF.
One of my good friends I made through work got an interview because she mentioned her hobbies of “reading, writing and recycling”. Our boss felt she had to meet the person who would write that; of course we were a somewhat quirky non-profit so it was just right. She showed up for the interview in a peasant dress and Timberlands and it just worked out from there!
Not if you expect formatting to be preserved. The only commonly used file formats designed to precisely reproduce the format of a printed page are Postscript and PDF, the latter being a subset of the former.
I don’t like sending my résumé in editable form. I don’t want anybody but me changing it.
After reading carefully, you’ll see that the extra page was on a real, old-fashioned paper résumé. The candidate printed it and didn’t even notice the last page was blank.
A coffee shop I frequent has a TV with CNN and the CC on, sound off. Occasionally I watch just to see how common this is. Most of the CC makes zero sense until you sound out what it says and realize what it means. I think in this case the CC is done in real time. Much less excuse for a scripted show like seinfeld.
From that list of errors:
October 2000 - January 2002
Personal Assistant to G. Scott Paterson
What is wrong with that? I can’t figure it out. Unless the guy’s name is Peterson, not Paterson, but how would someone reading a resume normally know that?
Sorry, I can see how that might be unclear (and plus it’s less of a mistake and more a wtf? type thing). I think the problem was that after that job title, there was no more information listed: no description of what the person actually did, or anything else, which is pretty pointless. Plus the lack of clarification as to who G. Scott Paterson actually is made it seem like the reader should know – eg. “not gasp the G. Scott Paterson?!”
meh, I think it was funny at the time, but I can’t guarantee that I was fully awake when I thought that.
Guess again.
In 1923, the state of Illinois legally defined its official language (look for the yellow, near the bottom) as American. They have since gone back to English, as of 1969.
.pdfs are not guaranteed to preserve formatting.
They generally do a pretty good job of it (better than Word anyway), but they can get screwed up, too.