I hate Excel - you know that sketchy place on South U. that provides cheap coursepacks by having students make the copies themselves and thus exploiting a loophole in copyright law. It stinks. It’s hot. It’s messy and dirty. The lines are always way too long. Their copy machines are super old and slow and the copies always come out misaligned and fudgy. This afternoon, I spent at least an hour getting my 300+ page infoviz coursepack - that included having to stop seven times to clear paper jams and then having to move to a different machine because the one I was at kept jamming (not that the second machine didn’t jam either). When I was making my copies today, I kept thinking that this place looks like a scene straight out of a bad John Grisham novel. It’s like we were all there trying to secretly make copies of confidential documents or something. That plotline kept me amused and silenced that voice in my head that kept saying, “Why am I here?!? Why can’t this coursepack be in a PDF on CTools? Why am I spending a perfectly nice, sunny Friday afternoon holed up in a hot, stinky room?!?”

I wish all of my coursepacks were at Dollar Bill. Sure, they’re more expensive but at least they’re quick and professional and I don’t have to make the copies myself.

And they also use the software that I worked on this summer! :)