Saturday Night Rant

I got back from Fargo a couple of hours ago, and now as my eyelids droop, for some reason I'm experiencing renewed annoyance at the fact that my university does not have an electronic submission option for theses and dissertations. The University of Tennessee has had it for about five years now, and I can't tell you how satisfying it was not to have to buy all that archival cotton paper, print out my M.A. thesis, and haul it to the Office of Graduate Studies. Instead, I saved the file on a Zip disk and took it over for the administrative assistant to copy it onto her hard drive, got my imprimatur from the Dean, and walked away. I'm taking my prelims this summer, and as far as I know, there isn't even talk of implementing electronic submission. Perhaps Shane will know who would make that decision and would help me.