Someone Has To Do It

People, at least non-kosher people, like bacon. Ergo, we have people who grow bacon. Because people really like bacon - sometimes for eating, sometimes for taping to cats (Emp. Peng., please do not get ideas; it has been done) - we need to grow bacon efficiently, which means keeping bacon growers up to date on the latest pork-producing technology and developments.

Enter the Swine Extension Specialist. Yes, apparently that is a real job, which involves waking up in the morning and putting "Evaluate pork producers' acceptance of distance education media" on one's to-do list. It's not quite taping bacon to a cat, but if you can't convince pork producers to drop in on a video conference every now and then, you'll run out of bacon, though the cat supply presumably remains unaffected.

At this point, I am, of course, imagining these people at a cocktail party.
"So, what do you do?"
"I study ways to convince hog farmers to take correspondence courses"
::crickets::

I am also wondering how many people bought tickets to an event called the Indiana Pork Conference and were disappointed, and why "sow" isn't a more widely accepted unit of measurement, but that's another entry entirely. One I will not be writing.

Back to the Swine Extension Specialist. Buried in the methodology section of the aforelinked study is this little gem:

To give the producers more information about distance education, a handout was developed for them to take with them and read at their leisure. The handout gave the producers general information about distance education, media used in distance education, and contacts for more information about distance education. 

As much as I would not want to have a job description like "Study ways to overcome hog farmers' objections to chatrooms," I'm doubly glad my to-do list does not include "write hog farmer swag." I'm guessing that the intern or grad assistant got that appended to his or her list.

Note to Purdue University: while I've never been to a pork producers' conference, I've been to writers' conferences and music teachers' conferences. I even managed to crash a urology conference once. As swag goes, a handout on distance education sucks. I got better swag from the urology conference, and the closest I get to being a urologist is having a urinary tract. Should you ever consider updating this study, you'll get better results with fridge magnets, mini buttons, pens or this.