The
coverage of the 14th Annual Postmodern Village Conference began in the
office of this reporter in the cold, efflourescent, International-Style-on-a-Provincial-Budget
Communications Building at EastWestern University in Purewater, Kansas
with this reporter using his office phone to call (toll free) a call
center in Bangalore. The coverage ended there as well.
In these financially strained times in higher education, and amid wranglings
over such necessities as coaches' salaries, new cappuccino machines
for the student day spa and Olympic-style gymnasium, and WiFi for the
ag. program's dairy parlors (both bovine and caprian), things
of such ephemeral importance as academic conferences tend to get cut.
So,
the Office of the Vice President of Marketing and Ancillary Services
(which, after reorganizing and re-prioritizing under Executive Vice
President Adam Smith-Friedman, includes academics), after a grueling
15 minutes of cost-benefit analysis and an electronic amortization,
decided to outsource the 14th Annual Postmodern Village Conference to
India. Just as this report was phoned in, so were all of the papers,
with the presenters drawn from the local workforce in order to save
costs. I have been assured by a trusted spreadsheet that this resulted
in no discernable diminution in quality.
That said, the 14th Annual Postmodern Village Conference was, as always, a rousing success, apparently. This reporter was on hold for forty-five minutes during the first three attempts to move through the telephonic menu and actually access our people "on the ground," and even then he only got about half the information solicited. But they at the call center were only doing their jobs and there was no need to escalate the calls to a managerial level and threaten what little they had managed to get from the unevenly ballooning Indian economy. Still, through deduction, ingenuity, and sophisticated computer modeling, the following report managed to come together.
Your reading may be monitored to assure quality.