File naming, first hand.

Earlier this summer, I decided to e-mail all of my professors for a syllabus of the classes I would be starting in September. Esther e-mailed me back with syllabi and assignment lists for the classes, and so did my other professor. We'll call him Professor Roundglasses.
The problem with the attachments from my Professor Roundglasses lay in the naming of the documents themselves. The naming was precise, with the month and year listed, but the dates were not in an expected format, such as 080808 (the start date of The Olympics) but rather 08.08.o8. My computer, being the good little Windows machine that it is, didn't look at the formatting of the file, but the name of the file. Windows looks at what's called an extension of the file name, which follows the following format:
filename.extension . Most extensions have three letters, some have more and some have fewer, but they ALL have one thing in common: they start with a dot. Windows reads the file name and sees the dot, and then assumes that everything after the dot must be an extension. In this case, the extension should have been .doc, but Windows said "No, no, it must be .08.08.doc!" and promptly refused to open it. Thinking quickly, I removed the dots in the file names, and Windows finally decided to behave.

It's not easy being this smart AND handsome.... :-)