Laura Occasionally Blogs

Super professional ways I have responded to work requests in the last week:

"yesss. yes? yes"

"This might cause UTTER CHAOS. Let's find out together!"

"I guess I don't see a problem with this.... I GUESS"

"weird"

"Hahahahaha. I have no idea."

Never promote me to client-facing.

For work reasons, I currently have a word document open which simply says

“don’t crush my moustache”

TO: redcloud.l
FROM: jerk.s
SUBJECT: RE:lol
SENT: June 8, 2010, 11:20EST

hehe

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I now work on an all-male (except for the boss!) team, which means my gender has caused a bit of comment since I came--nothing terrible, just some tiresome lip service to, oh, we should stop cursing now there's a lady present (not that they do, which is fine, since I fucking love cursing, but, you know, why bother saying what you don't mean?), finally some female energy on the team (which depending on tone and context can be an okay pro-diversity type sentiment or weirdly oh-what-pleasure-she'll-bring-to-us, make-us-pockets-and-sing-to-us), "night guys... and gal" (if you can't call a group which includes or consists of girls "guys", I have some serious explaining to do to all the women I've ever known).

Progress, though: today two of them described my ownership of an Edward Cullen action figure as "a little gay."

My boss's boss has a poster in her office called "Dublin Pubs." Naturally my eye is drawn to this during meetings because I am a fan of Dublin pubs and the delicious, delicious pear Bulmers they serve. (None of them were ones I'd been to, as far as I could tell.) A map and a sketch are inset at the bottom, and while I'm mildly curious as to why the map shows such a long pub crawl all over the metro Dublin area when I feel like it's more impressive and totally possible to get a complete poster's worth of equally interesting pub photos within any two block square, what I'm most curious about is why the sketch appears to be depict peasantishly dressed and Guinness-waving Kirk and Spock circa 2300.

I really hope IT is not keeping a log of the web block error messages I've received.

Content blocked by your organization. This category is filtered: Internet Radio and TV
Content blocked by your organization. This category is filtered: Adult Content
Content blocked by your organization. This category is filtered: Personals/Dating
Content blocked by your organization. This category is filtered: Marijuana

Ack! I know what that looks like. That looks like: porn, porn, porn, pot. I can explain, sort of! Although admittedly not working, I was doing the fairly innocent non-work-at-work activities of trying to donate to public radio, read fan fiction (okay, that's probably not super kosher, but in my defense, even the gen stuff is blocked if it's on a site with erotica), take an online quiz at what used to be TheSpark and is now OKCupid, and look at that picture of those spiderwebs spun by a spider on caffeine. I promise I am just a garden variety slacker.

The coffee packets in the work pantry feature pairs of flavor adjectives perfect for the "I like my coffee like I like my men" game.

For the "sexy lumberjack" department: bold & earthy

For the "bad boy in a pool hall" department: strong & smoky

For the "ew" department: creamy & nutty

And my personal favorite: rich & fruity

Congratulations to all on last week’s fire evacuation. Our evacuation time was 10 minutes. Since we were given prior notice of this drill and some of our colleagues chose to exit the building prior to the actual alarm, our evacuation time was not a true test of how long it would take to evacuate our floors.

GUILTY AS CHARGED.

At work I'm dealing with a math text which contains word problems like the following:

In designing an industrial robot, an engineer calculates the number of teeth needed for each gear with the expression PN + 2P. Factor this expression.

Is it just me, or does that seem like the most phoned-in word problem ever? It's like they heard somewhere that students prefer problems that connect to the "real world," and also robots.

Seriously. WHAT ARE N AND P. Gears? Teeth? That that is the part students have problems with in algebra: the letters are meaningless. The whole point of word problems is to show that the letters do represent quantities which we know things about (just not their actual value), not to simply showcase a job they don't have in which algebra might be used, but we don't really know how. That silly little line above the actual problem is at best irrelevant flavor text and at worst totally confusing in a maxim-of-relevance-violating kind of way. Students will sit there like, "Okay, P(N+2), I would have thought, but WHERE DO I FACTOR IN THE ROBOTS??"

Sorry, former tutor rant. It just frustrates me when the entities writing the expensive glossy-paged textbooks obviously have no real understanding of how humans learn.