So this personnel agent asks me to add some items to my résumé and mail it to her. No sweat. I keep the thing in HTML, because it’s convenient and relatively efficient. But when my agent gets it, oh dear, she sees no icon showing the attachment (because HTML is a format that Outlook understands, so it displays the content rather than a mere icon) and so she can’t save my résumé in her database and mail it to the client. Could I possibly put it in (I groan in anticipation) Word?

So I go to my housemate’s computer, download résumé.html (2617 bytes), open it in MessyWord, save it in Redmond format (23552 bytes), mail it to myself, save it, and mail that to the agent.

Argh. Such irony: her convenience requires the file to be in a format that her mail client cannot read; and so I send it in a format with the most generic extension — .doc — which Their own mail client treats as alien.