Saturday, January 15, 2011

Hello, Caption Obvious...

This is what government service is like.  They give you some responsibility and then make you take 'training' every year to make sure you remember the rules for the responsibility. I can understand the thinking behind the monotony of it all, but sometimes their trainings are little more than read and take a quiz, which is honestly better than being called into an hour long meeting to just have them read a powerpoint presentation that you could read on your own faster. 

Well, my latest training was on how to use and not abuse a travel card (its just a credit card they issue you in your name so you don't have to accrue business travel charges on your personal cards).  It was a 7 page powerpoint presentation and in the whole thing there was only one page with any other than words.  And it was this slide, with clipart, that grabbed my attention.  The slide is titled "Using ATM, [etc]."  The clipart along with the title of the slide appears to me to be a woman standing at an ATM.  Well, whoever made this presentation was obviously not happy with people using their imaginations (it sometimes gets people in trouble in the government) and went onto to create an unnecessary caption for the obvious piece of clipart.  "Woman using an ATM."  Not only did they write the caption but they placed it in a word bubble above the image. Its just amazing, I can picture someone back in D.C. having just spent over an hour putting all this info together in a rather mundane presentation and then thinking, lets jazz it up with a picture!  And then once they put in the picture, they suddenly feared that the image might confuse people, so they decided that a caption would clear up any confusion, even though the fact that they used a word bubble makes me wonder if the ATM is just reporting out loud what is happening as it happens or the woman is narrating her own life in the third person...

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