COLLECTIVE SELF-ABSORPTION: The worst fault of many sports announcers is the belief (or actions consistent with the belief) that the audience wants to hear them instead of the game they're calling. Actors fail when their work focuses on actorly performance instead of service of the story. Journalists cannot stop themselves from writing stories about how journalists write stories (I read a story on ESPN a week or two ago about how Albert Pujols refused to apologize for not making himself available for interviews -- if journalists were not the only people who noticed that Pujols didn't make himself available to say nothing insightful, surely they were the only ones who thought he should apologize for it), and authors who are journalists or college professors or lawyers can't help but write fiction about clever or heroic journalists or college professors or lawyers (or authors).
I mention this only because I upgraded (more accurately, I was upgraded, and most accurately, I was switched) to Word 2010 in my office today. I may someday see the wisdom or utility in taking everything that was there before and putting it somewhere else, like some insane professional organizer came into your house and moved literally everything without telling you where it went -- it may make sense for people starting anew, but shouldn't the 20 years we've spent learning Word count for something? But even accepting, without liking, that aspect of Word 2010, I must ask this: who at Microsoft was responsible for thinking that what people needed was more space devoted to What Microsoft Word Does (a chaotic jumble of what used to reside in the pull-down menus) and correspondingly less space for that other thing, what's it called, oh, yeah, your document?
