google is stranger than fiction

So, I am on the program committee for an annual conference, and have been helping to organize sponsorships for this year’s meeting, which is being held in Germany.

We ended up getting a sponsorship of $2,000 from Google. I did not finagle this, but I am in charge of invoicing for it and making sure it actually gets paid.

This basically went like this:

conference organizer introduces me to Google contact and tells me to take care of things

I contact Google contact, let him know i plan to invoice, and ask for contact information/details about how to invoice

no response

I send a reminder

No response

So finally I graft together an invoice based on this guy’s contact information and addresses I found on Google Maps, etc. and email it to him.

Very quickly, I hear back from an administrator who tells me, “oh no, this is all wrong, we have this whole process.” She is very nice, helpful, and responsive and walks us through setting up a profile in their system, blah blah blah.

Then we have to wait for them to look at the profile we just set up and assign a Purchase Order Number to us.

Finally we got our PO #, which meant it was OK to re-send the invoice.

Only when I looked at the PO, I learned….

…this involves MAILING A PIECE OF PAPER TO SLOVAKIA.

The logic of this is all sound, I guess, if clunky: the conference takes place in Germany, ergo Google Germany is the official sponsor. Google Germany’s Accounts Payable Office is in Slovakia. And local law prohibits the use of electronic invoices. (This one is the kicker, of course. Can we just put into place a universal law that electronic invoices are allowed?)

So, today I invoiced like the biggest internet company in the universe, by mailing a piece of paper to Slovakia.

As an added bonus, my envelope looks totally ghetto, because the pre-printed return address is wrong, and I have to cross it out and correct it every time.

 

Becky investigates Google +

Have you guys tried this yet? http://plus.google.com/

I have, but so far am not that into it, although I think it is promising. Robyn, since you have a gmail account, you are basically ready to roll with it, if you want to be. Kels, if it’s something that interests you I think I can send you an invite. It seems to combine a lot of the features of Facebook and Twitter, with more flexibility for sharing certain things only with certain people: all of your friends are divided into “circles” (so I have friends, family, SI, UM Library, digital humanities, etc.) and every time you post something, you choose which circles it goes to. So if I have a question or comment that pertains to work only, I can show it only to that circle. This allows me to control privacy a little bit more, but could also reduce information overflow, I think, if people use it thoughtfully: like, not only do I benefit by showing my post only to the people that I want to see it, all of my other friends and/or colleagues benefit by not having to see dozens of irrelevant posts from me that don’t pertain to them, and will just make them annoyed with me.

From my perspective, this is a nice feature because it will allow me to 1) Be connected with people that I’ve met at conferences, or worked with on committees and stuff and 2) Continue my habit of posting long, frequent status updates without embarrassing myself or giving these people reason to roll their eyes when they think of me.

However, I’m still getting used to the google + interface, and I”m not quite comfortable there, yet.

Other features are, it has a way to package up all of your stuff (photos, posts, etc.) and export it from there if you want to.

I also like the “+1” feature: if you’re logged in to Google +, when you’re browsing the web, on lots of other sites you have the option to “+1” something. This is basically like “liking” it on FB, except you can do it anywhere. When you do this, it will get added to a list of things that you have “+1”-ed on your profile, so when someone looks at your profile, they can automatically see a list of basically everything that you have liked–from someone else’s post, to a random article from the New York Times. Sort of combines Facebook’s “liking” and Twitter’s “retweeting.”

I use both FB and Twitter pretty actively, and unless there’s an easy way to sort of manage all three through a single application, I’m not sure I can keep up with all of these (or want to–I don’t keep my FB and Twitter connected, because I use them for totally different things). So I’m not a wholehearted Google + user yet. But it definitely seems interesting.