(no subject)
Okay, life-post. Long post, at that.
Life is crazy. I enjoy each part of it - sleeping, working, schooling - but all of them combined, and draped over the chancy beast that is the Madison busing system to boot, make for a chaotic world.
Today, for instance. I don't know where today went. It's all chopped up into hours - the first hour, I decided I could sleep through and still catch the bus, then the next hour was getting ready and going to school, then Calc, then sleeping in the library, then reading Modern Europe stuff, then French, then the Modern Europe class, then eating dinner (see what I mean? I first got up at 6:30, but seven hours later, I'm eating dinner), then anthropology for three hours (and, wow - lots of stuff to complain about there), then to the bus and back home and here I am ready to go to bed. I'm glad I have today off from work, but I wish I had a better idea of how all of those seemingly disjointed blocks of time made me so tired again.
Oh, yes - anthropology. I don't know if the teacher really doesn't understand genetics any better than he "explained" or if that was his idea of dumbing it down for people, but, good lord, he told them that DNA comes in two "chromosome-parts" - represented by a pair of oblong shapes drawn on the board - that were divided into various sections called "traits" or "alleles". While he did refrain from using the terms "big letter" and "little letter" in his headlong explanation of Mendelian genetics, that's about as scientific as it got. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I've always had better results from just explaining things to adults in straight-forward terms without actually lying about anything to make it sound easier. I think that, when people perceive that you're dumbing something down for them, they decide that it must be incredibly difficult and panic.
This was a point my Calculus teacher made indirectly - we're working on stuff that is an extension of basic algebraic principles, and he said something like, "Well, we don't have a formula, so we don't factor that - well, no. That's what I tell my algebra students. For you guys, the determinant is negative, and therefore we'd be introducing a complex number - man, that felt good to say - so it's not that we can't, we just won't right now."
Okay, it's been a long time since I had an algebra class, but I know that factoring with the whole "negative 'b' plus-or-minus the square root of 'b' squared minus four-'a'-'c' divided by two-'a'" thing came up more than once, with the term "determinant" attached to what was under the radical. It's not a huge step from knowing that you can't take the square root of a negative - something that's taught when square roots are first introduced back in, what, junior high? - to knowing that your factoring equation isn't going to work if you've you have a square root of a negative stuck in the middle of it. Algebra students might not know all of this in the same ingrained way that Calc students typically do, but I don't think that you need to scale the explanation down to "we don't have a formula for it" to placate them, especially when you're working with college students.
Anyway.
Kinko's is...definitely not your usual job. It's crazy all by itself. Supposedly, I have a job title and a real position that I'm supposed to be working, but no one - including the woman who hired me - actually knows or cares what it is, so I just ignore such constraints. Basically, I do whatever I know how to do and am shown how to do what I don't know. There's a long list of things that fall into those categories, but I have a fairly good idea of what those things are. The scary thing is, though, that I now find myself training other people in - two people were hired very shortly after me, but I'm the one who will eventually be working third shift and therefore must know how to run the whole store by myself if need be, so they often come to me for help with minor customer interactions and information about stuff I've done fairly often in the course of following senior employees around like some kind of puppy but that they've missed for whatever reason.
(I really need to get a bike. I think I shall continue telling my mother, when she calls, that I don't have one and don't plan to get one anytime soon, but the hours at that place are too chaotic to be dependent upon a bus system that stops at midnight when the store is open twenty-four hours and I'm working a weird combination of day and night shifts. It's too cold to ride everywhere, but I could at least strap the bike to the front of the bus so that if I have to stay late, I won't be faced with another five-mile hike across the city in the wee hours of the morning.)
Oh, and I'm really, really sick of copyright laws. I've had two people walk in with original art on my shifts. I tried to help the first guy and ended up getting yelled at for it, so I was explaining to the next person that we couldn't copy the art for him and then the same manager who had yelled at me the night before came up, took the guy's driver's license and compared the signatures, and said we could do it for sixty bucks. I have no idea what the difference was, or if there even was a difference - it could have just been that the manager was pissed the first night about being called in on his night off and didn't want to deal with anyone, or that the second guy hardly spoke English and clearly wasn't getting what I was saying about copyright laws - but I'm not even going to bring it up. I figure that I can't go wrong with a policy of just refusing them all, since that's what the relevant section of the employee handbook actually says to do, but it still annoys me that he acted like I was being obtuse with the second customer when he had just yelled at me the night before for telling the other guy how to work the color copiers.
A random bit of geekiness, though: I was thinking about how ugly a report I'm working on will look printed on the cheap library paper and bound with a staple - which proves in and of itself that I've been spending too much time with the Kinko's crowd - and then I remembered that oh-yeah-duh, I work at a printing shop and can run off a new copy and bind it myself in about a minute. Yay, employee perks?
And that's quite enough from me. I really will stop ignoring everyone once life settles back into something resembling sanity - supposedly, I have great big holes in my schedule during which I could be doing things other than the big three, but in practice, it doesn't really work that way, or at least hasn't been these past few weeks. I'm not failing anything, though, so that's a plus.
Life is crazy. I enjoy each part of it - sleeping, working, schooling - but all of them combined, and draped over the chancy beast that is the Madison busing system to boot, make for a chaotic world.
Today, for instance. I don't know where today went. It's all chopped up into hours - the first hour, I decided I could sleep through and still catch the bus, then the next hour was getting ready and going to school, then Calc, then sleeping in the library, then reading Modern Europe stuff, then French, then the Modern Europe class, then eating dinner (see what I mean? I first got up at 6:30, but seven hours later, I'm eating dinner), then anthropology for three hours (and, wow - lots of stuff to complain about there), then to the bus and back home and here I am ready to go to bed. I'm glad I have today off from work, but I wish I had a better idea of how all of those seemingly disjointed blocks of time made me so tired again.
Oh, yes - anthropology. I don't know if the teacher really doesn't understand genetics any better than he "explained" or if that was his idea of dumbing it down for people, but, good lord, he told them that DNA comes in two "chromosome-parts" - represented by a pair of oblong shapes drawn on the board - that were divided into various sections called "traits" or "alleles". While he did refrain from using the terms "big letter" and "little letter" in his headlong explanation of Mendelian genetics, that's about as scientific as it got. I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I've always had better results from just explaining things to adults in straight-forward terms without actually lying about anything to make it sound easier. I think that, when people perceive that you're dumbing something down for them, they decide that it must be incredibly difficult and panic.
This was a point my Calculus teacher made indirectly - we're working on stuff that is an extension of basic algebraic principles, and he said something like, "Well, we don't have a formula, so we don't factor that - well, no. That's what I tell my algebra students. For you guys, the determinant is negative, and therefore we'd be introducing a complex number - man, that felt good to say - so it's not that we can't, we just won't right now."
Okay, it's been a long time since I had an algebra class, but I know that factoring with the whole "negative 'b' plus-or-minus the square root of 'b' squared minus four-'a'-'c' divided by two-'a'" thing came up more than once, with the term "determinant" attached to what was under the radical. It's not a huge step from knowing that you can't take the square root of a negative - something that's taught when square roots are first introduced back in, what, junior high? - to knowing that your factoring equation isn't going to work if you've you have a square root of a negative stuck in the middle of it. Algebra students might not know all of this in the same ingrained way that Calc students typically do, but I don't think that you need to scale the explanation down to "we don't have a formula for it" to placate them, especially when you're working with college students.
Anyway.
Kinko's is...definitely not your usual job. It's crazy all by itself. Supposedly, I have a job title and a real position that I'm supposed to be working, but no one - including the woman who hired me - actually knows or cares what it is, so I just ignore such constraints. Basically, I do whatever I know how to do and am shown how to do what I don't know. There's a long list of things that fall into those categories, but I have a fairly good idea of what those things are. The scary thing is, though, that I now find myself training other people in - two people were hired very shortly after me, but I'm the one who will eventually be working third shift and therefore must know how to run the whole store by myself if need be, so they often come to me for help with minor customer interactions and information about stuff I've done fairly often in the course of following senior employees around like some kind of puppy but that they've missed for whatever reason.
(I really need to get a bike. I think I shall continue telling my mother, when she calls, that I don't have one and don't plan to get one anytime soon, but the hours at that place are too chaotic to be dependent upon a bus system that stops at midnight when the store is open twenty-four hours and I'm working a weird combination of day and night shifts. It's too cold to ride everywhere, but I could at least strap the bike to the front of the bus so that if I have to stay late, I won't be faced with another five-mile hike across the city in the wee hours of the morning.)
Oh, and I'm really, really sick of copyright laws. I've had two people walk in with original art on my shifts. I tried to help the first guy and ended up getting yelled at for it, so I was explaining to the next person that we couldn't copy the art for him and then the same manager who had yelled at me the night before came up, took the guy's driver's license and compared the signatures, and said we could do it for sixty bucks. I have no idea what the difference was, or if there even was a difference - it could have just been that the manager was pissed the first night about being called in on his night off and didn't want to deal with anyone, or that the second guy hardly spoke English and clearly wasn't getting what I was saying about copyright laws - but I'm not even going to bring it up. I figure that I can't go wrong with a policy of just refusing them all, since that's what the relevant section of the employee handbook actually says to do, but it still annoys me that he acted like I was being obtuse with the second customer when he had just yelled at me the night before for telling the other guy how to work the color copiers.
A random bit of geekiness, though: I was thinking about how ugly a report I'm working on will look printed on the cheap library paper and bound with a staple - which proves in and of itself that I've been spending too much time with the Kinko's crowd - and then I remembered that oh-yeah-duh, I work at a printing shop and can run off a new copy and bind it myself in about a minute. Yay, employee perks?
And that's quite enough from me. I really will stop ignoring everyone once life settles back into something resembling sanity - supposedly, I have great big holes in my schedule during which I could be doing things other than the big three, but in practice, it doesn't really work that way, or at least hasn't been these past few weeks. I'm not failing anything, though, so that's a plus.