Sometimes I really hate computers

I am usually not one who's down on IT and computers as a rule (maybe I'm still young and naive, but I'm usually left being the one who defends IT and engineering when my older, more experienced peers start talking about how unattractive the field is), but sometimes, I really, really, really hate this day and age when everything is automatic and relies on computers.

I was trying to submit my journal paper this afternoon. Like most of the CS journals out there nowadays, the entire process is automatic -- you fill in forms with the title, abstract, contact author etc, then upload your cover letter and paper in Word format (why in the world would ANYBODY use Word -- but that's for another post, another day), and then it coverts it to HTML and pdf formats automatically.

And that's when the problem started. My document has both English and Chinese in it, and apparently there are some conversion problems with the Chinese characters. They kept on coming out as weird symbols, no matter what font I changed them to. More frustratingly, only some of those characters would get changed, but those that "didn't work" varied from trial to trial, and I couldn't not find any consistency between trials. And on occasion, I would get this "Conversion failed" message from the server, for no reason at all that I could discern.

I ended up fighting with that silly site for 3 hours, after which I just gave up and emailed the editors with a message telling them not to look at the PDF document. Sigh. You'd think that a COMPUTER SCIENCE journal could somehow get this correct, but alas, no.