The Mainly Annual EastWesterly Review / Postmodern Village Conference 2007

A Report on the 14th Annual Conference and Hootenanny

By Special Correspondent T.S. "Shortstraw" DeHaviland

DeHaviland's phone. Not actual size.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.

Dairy parlors, also not actual size.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.

Executive Vice President Adam Smith-Friedman. Actual size of brain represented when viewed on a Motorola Razr.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.

 

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