I always harbour fond hopes he might decide to go inside and do my filing

Hypothetical (Note: I have not (yet) been offered this job)

Imagine you are unemployed and someone offers you a job that they could reasonably assume you would find attractive.

They give you a choice:
(1) you can have the job automatically, and start right away, with a contract for a year, at the end of which they will have to advertise the position and you may or may not be successfully reappointed.
or
(2) they advertise the position now, which will take a few weeks (perhaps a month or so), and they expect a lot of applicants. Moreover, the selection criteria are unlikely to fit you very well (i.e. your only chance will be if no one with a certain qualification applies). BUT if you are successful, you will receive a two-year contract.

I would choose (1), no question. Someone who I said this to was quite surprised, having expected me to choose (2). I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly even consider choosing (2). Or am I just unusually risk-averse?

What would you have chosen?

In a Bond-like feat of counter-intelligence...

What strikes me about this story—apart from the obligatory angle of OMG the SIS is spying on people!—is the following line:

The file continues to track Leadbeater's life, although the SIS lost track of her when she married and took her husband's name.

Awesome job, dudes. Note to self: in order to evade NZ's top intelligence people, just get married and change your name. SO SNEAKY!

How to spend nine hours doing five hours of work

I quite enjoy reading Dr Crazy's lists of things she works on in a day. Maybe it's because I'm nosy, or maybe it gives valuable insight into what it's like to be a real academic. Either way, I thought I'd show you what it's like to be a FAKE academic, in the form of detailing all the crap I did today.

But because I'm long-winded and incapable of not editorializing, you get the uncut version rather than the snappy List of Crazy.

Today I managed to land myself in a situation where I had to was privileged to be working for ALL of my bosses all in the one day. Yet despite beginning work at 9 and leaving reluctantly at 6:30, I only succeeded in getting through five hours of work I can actually bill anyone for. How does this happen? you may very well not actually ask because you aren't interested. But I will tell you anyway. Ha ha!

9:00–9:20: Waiting for one of the people I do research assistant work for (henceforth 'Boss #1'). He asked me to be there at 9am so we could get an early start. Despite not sleeping at all because of the horrible heat-wave we are having in my bedroom lately, I forced myself out of bed in time to make it (but only by skipping breakfast). Boss #1 waltzes in 20 minutes later, saying, "Wow, I just couldn't drag myself out of bed this morning. Must be the heat."

9:20–12 o'clock: I photocopy a 600-page book for Boss #1. It apparently doesn't occur to him that it costs him more to pay me to copy it than it would for him to just buy a copy (or steal the library copy and pay the 'lost book' fine). Nor does he seem concerned by copyright.

10:30–11am (yes, we did just go back in time here): Colleagues persuade me forcefully to come and have morning tea as a break from copying. Since they are all salaried, it does not occur to them that a half-hour break loses me nearly $20. But they are persuasive. There is coffee. And we actually talk about research, so it's not wasted time.

12–1 pm: Usually I take 30 minutes for lunch and/or eat at my desk while working. Today there is free lunch (!!!11!eleventy-one!) in honour of something Asian. Unfortunately the walk there and back, queuing for food, and talking to people there means I use a full hour for lunch. It does not occur to me until later that I could have bought a nicer lunch with the money I would have earned if I had worked that extra half hour instead of using it to seek out free food. Sigh.

1–1:30 pm: Boss #2 sends me to the library to hunt her down a journal article. I start with the online journal, but alas, the one issue I need is the only one since 1984 that they haven't digitised. Fortunately our library has it. Unfortunately it appears to be on the level that is undergoing repairs and I have to send a grumpy librarian into the roped-off depths to fetch it. Even more unfortunately it is not on the shelf and I have to submit an online request for them to look for it. Even more unfortunately, my library card no longer works all of a sudden.

1:30–2 pm: I try to work out what is wrong with my library card. The librarians try to work out what is wrong with my library card. Epic fail. Finally it is discovered that they accidentally overwrote my newer staff profile with the old (supposedly deleted) student profile. I am still weighing up whether I can bill Boss #2 for this period of time, since I wouldn't have had to get my card working if I weren't having to order her journal, but on the other hand, I still would have had to do it eventually.

2pm–3 pm: Ice cream break. I can't handle the heat. Yes, it's a long ice cream break. This is the one period of the day where the lack of productivity is truly and honestly all my own fault.

3pm–3:45 pm: I return to my office and find it writhing with what appears to be panicking ants. Presumably they are panicking because they have accidentally found their way into an OFFICE and there is NO FOOD. This doesn't, however, mean that they return the way they came. I sit down to do some work, but when the ants decide to undertake an epic journey of exploration into my cleavage, I am forced to take action. I spend the next half hour trying to find out who at the university is responsible for pest control. When I reach them, they assure me they will deal with it by next week. Awsumness.

3:45–4:45 pm: Work for Boss #3. This is so excrutiatingly boring I want to tear out my eyeballs, and I long for those good old days (this morning) of endless photocopying. Brief moment of levity thanks to an entry in a (senior!) academic's journal article's bibliography that actually says, "[Surname, First name]. File on my computer. 2009." I change it to "Unpublished manuscript".

4:45–5:45 pm: I suddenly realise that I haven't checked my email all day. Unfortunately doing so catapults me into an unexpected skirmish between Boss #3 and his publisher, who have been sending each other emails all day with increasing levels of hostility, and passive-aggressively CCing me in. I sort things out as best I can, but lose another 30 minutes to replying to emails that I can't, however creatively, bill any of my bosses for.

5:45–6:30 pm: Back to the eyeball-frying job for Boss #3. Eventually I gnaw off my own hands in a bid to get out of having to reformat a LaTeX manuscript into Word, and give up for the day, not having finished what I set out to accomplish.

In summary, the actual paid part of my day was 2.5 hours in the morning for Boss #1, half an hour at the library for Boss #2, and 2 hours 15 minutes in the afternoon for Boss #3. I was present and not-on-an-ice-cream-break for 9 1/2 hours, of which I get paid for 5 1/4.

Quick calculation: earnings for the day: $180 before tax.
If I earned minimum wage at McDonalds, I would have earned $136 (assuming I worked all 9.5 hours, which I guess I might not have, given an unpaid lunch break).
So that's at least a $46 advantage. Plus an ice cream break. Whew!

THIS is why I'm an academic. Good thing I remembered.

Ah yes, people asking me to work for free: must be Wednesday

So I'm sitting in my office at 9:30 at night working because I have so much shit to do I am stressed out of my little treehouse, and a certain senior colleague drops by and makes himself comfortable on the edge of my desk.

"Hey, you know what's fun?" he asked. "If you're working in the evening, and you need to take a little break?"

"What?"

"Well, you can go next door to the linguistics library, and do a bit of tidying. It's in a terrible state! And you know, with the budget cuts and all, we had to stop paying someone to organise it. So if we all just shelve a few books here and there when we're tired of working, it'll get back in shape in no time!"

He beamed at me. "You know what I did last night?" he continued. "When I'd shelved some books and tidied the tables, I chose a section, and I re-alphabetised it! Would you believe: someone had shelved Jones after Joseph, and Jenkins before Jamison! Anyway, I've done I–K, so feel free to take any of the other sections when you get a moment."

A rose by any other name...

We have an oldish, very polite British chap in our department who works on translation. He often goes around from office to office asking people what they think the precise difference in nuance is between various words, or whether a given word has a certain connotation for people of different generations. Today's encounter, however, made me laugh.

"Excuse me," he said, passing me in the corridor, "can I ask you a question?"
"Sure," I replied.
"Do you think there is any semantic difference between the words 'tosser' and 'wanker'?"

I had to think for a moment.

"If there's a difference," I eventually replied, "I think it's very slight. Maybe 'wanker' has more of a connotation of the person being stuck up, while 'tosser' is more of a general insult."
"Hmm..." he said, "Thank you. That's helpful."
"What on earth are you working on?" I asked, as he walked away.
"Oh!" he said, "It's not for my research. I'm writing a letter to the National Radio, and was trying to decide which I should call them."

Even professors can be special, special snowflakes

Me: "Okay, just to recap: you want me to standardise headings, figures, tables and example numbers; rewrite part one so that it actually makes sense*; check all the references; and make the formatting of the rest of the manuscript consistent?"

Prof: "That's right. Technically we should contact the people whose figures and images we are using and get copyright permission, but I don't have enough money to pay you to do that. It's cool, anyway: the publisher I'm using doesn't check that sort of thing."

Me: *gulp* "It wouldn't be too hard to contact them..."

Prof: "No no. This publisher was sued last year and it was fine. He just turned off the lights and hid under his desk until the lawyers went away. No one will bother trying again."

Me: "Yes, but—"

Prof: "So, about the formatting."

Me: "Right. Do you have a copy of the publisher's stylesheet I can take?"

Prof: "I've got one. But I don't like it. I think those styles are ugly. So we're going to ignore it. Here's how I like things formatted: [long list of weird-ass personal preferences]."

Me: "Don't you think the publisher will just reformat it to their own stylesheet anyway? So maybe we should just—"

Prof: "God no! They are far too lazy for that."

Me [thinks: and too busy being served with copyright infringement notices] "And what about the references?"

Prof: "Oh, whatever style you like. And don't waste time doing things like making sure they all have the same capitalisation or all have full stops after the date or anything. No one really cares about all that."

All I can say is that I'm going to make sure I get my money BEFORE this gets sent to the publisher, and then I'm going to run far far away. Also, for once, I DON'T want my name in the acknowledgments.


_____________

* Okay, so I didn't phrase it like that. But that's totally what she's asking me to do.

I totally swear I am not making this up even a little bit

We recently received the following email from our administrators:

Dear all,

For security reasons we are cataloging all weapons. Please advise if you keep knives, guns, blowtorches, explosives or similar in your offices.

Regards,
Admin.

In related news...

(Well, related to one of the random bullets, I'm sure), the publisher for my edited volume just contacted me to ask if I have any ideas for the cover! Whee!

Unfortunately, I suspect my initial thoughts (only in my head, never fear) of
(a) an epic battle between a giant squid and a fearsome white pointer shark
(b) pretty sparkly unicorns dancing in a meadow of flowers
would probably be rejected as 'inappropriate'. Pfft.

I at least need to specify a colour. This publisher has an unfortunate tendency of going with lime green or puke yellow if the author doesn't request anything different.

So what say you, wise readers? How do I come up with a sufficiently abstract yet attractive and not-stolen-from-anyone-else idea for the cover of a book about grammatical change?

Random bullets of 'If I don't blog in bullets I probably won't bother at all'

• Geekman's new deodorant has a scent I have christened 'feral citrus'. (If you'd like to hire me for your marketing department, just shoot me an email.)
• Actually, you should probably hire Geekman for your marketing department too. I can't get his marketing slogan for Super Cheap Auto* out of my head: 'More better faster. (Cheaper)'.
• The advantage of there being no part time teaching budget whatsoever this year is that I don't get to have to, you know, like, teach. So I can feel superior to all the poor sods currently stressing about enrollment numbers and syllabi and "learning management systems" and best practice and shit. (Plus, it means I'm available for your marketing department. Feral citrus: remember.)
• Also, I don't need to teach because I totally have other options. Like, four of them. And they each pay quite a lot a pittance that is slightly higher than what teaching would have. And only one is boring and unrelated to linguistics.
• Totally not at all even a little bit connected to that last point: I have finally worked out why, while I was editing a collected papers volume last year for the last four fucking years, senior academics would chide me and tell me it wasn't so hard really and I must be doing something wrong. It's because said senior academics, when they "edit" a volume do so by hiring someone like me to actually do the, you know, EDITING. And formatting. And hassling of contributors. It turns out it IS quite easy to edit a volume if all it involves is managing research assistants and the occasional phone call to the publisher.
• I can't even pronounce 'Obamabilia'.

• Hmmm... what else? It rained a little bit today. And Geekman and I took the afternoon off to eat doughnuts, drink coffee, and do a jigsaw puzzle.**
• The End.

___________

* A company name that I swear we did not make up even though it totally sounds like we did.

** Which is not a euphemism, but given the context, it sounds as though it should be.

Did Al Capone take over my country when I wasn't looking?

I had the weirdest conversation about New Zealand today.

The guy cutting my hair, originally from Korea, said he always wanted to travel to NZ but was scared to because of "all the gangsters".

"Gangsters?" I asked. "I don't think New Zealand is known for its gangsters."
"Yes, yes!" He assured me. "Very dangerous. I see it on SBS. A documentary. New Zealand has very many gangsters."
"Well, I know crime is high in some cities, but there are plenty of safer places too. Where would you like to go in NZ?"
"I like to camping," he said. "I want to walk native bush. Milford Sound."
"I'm pretty sure you'd be safe from criminals out in the bush."
"No!" he replied, shooting me a look of obvious contempt for my ignorance, "NZ have very many gangsters. Nowhere is safe."

Donation update

Claudia was due for her first frozen transfer today. You may remember there were four embryos total, of which one had already been transferred, unsuccessfully.

So yesterday the clinic started defrosting. The first and second ones to defrost didn't survive the process. The third (their last chance) did. Claudia and Rob started the trip to Sydney at five o'clock this morning. Halfway there they had a call from the clinic not to bother. The third embryo had not continued to develop.

So that was that. To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that we only got one transfer from 40+ follicles (22 fertilised eggs). The clinic had also said they had a near-100% successful thaw rate, so we're all wondering how come we got to be such outliers.

I've offered to do another cycle if they want to try again. I initially thought I'd do one only, but honestly the last one was no big deal, and I'm too invested in the process to give up now.

Probably only of interest to locals

I've been trying to find out what you can legally do in Australia to get money for a car that is unroadworthy, but still basically functional. NOWHERE online is this information forthcoming. So I thought I'd put up a short post here detailing what I've found out, in the hope that it might be useful to other people searching for the same information.

It seems you might be allowed to sell a car "as is", without passing a roadworthiness test, but you still need to have it inspected by a mechanic, and give the buyer the mechanic's list of what needs to be done to make it roadworthy; also you have to take reasonable steps to ensure that the buyer does not drive the car home from the sale: i.e. you can be prosecuted if they drive it with your knowledge. This all seems like too much hassle and expense for a car that is probably only going to sell for $300. Note: I was also unable to find out whether this is true for the ACT*—the information in this paragraph is based on what I could find out for some other states.

Inside the philosophy factory told me that charities in the USA will sometimes buy old cars, since they can sell them for scrap. This doesn't seem to be the case here.

Wreckers vary wildly in terms of how much they will give you, or whether they want your car at all. Nonetheless, this turned out to be the best option. I called 10 wreckers around the ACT. Most don't even answer their phones. Five did: two didn't want the car; one was willing to give us $80; one offered $50; and one (Queanbeyan Auto Dismantlers) offered $200. (You can guess which one we went with.) The two wreckers who didn't want our car at all also recommended trying Queanbeyan Auto Dismantlers, so I guess they are the biggest or otherwise most likely to buy cars.

Incidentally, the wreckers who offered money for the car were only interested once I told them we could drive the car over to them. If your car is undriveable, I think you'll be lucky not to have to PAY someone to take it away.

_____________

* Note: I'm deliberately including my state here, despite my anonymity. Otherwise this post is pretty much useless in terms of people searching for relevant info. However, I'm still avoiding using my city's name, as I prefer google searches for [CITY] + [UNIVERSITY] or [CITY] + linguistics not to list this blog in their results!

How to negotiate like someone who hardly knows what they are doing

We bought a new car!

Well, okay, actually it's really quite old.

But!! It's newer than our current one, which is what counts. And it's all blue and shiny. Hooray! It also has special features like power steering, air conditioning, and other things that have been standard in cars since 1753. Such as paintwork. And suspension.

Woot!

Here is a photo, not of our actual car, but a stunt double:


And the technical specifications, for those who like that sort of thing.

I would like to state for the record that I hate cars, and I hate buying them. I also hate driving them. I would like nothing better than to live without a car, and I'm not just saying that for my green credentials. But it turns out to be quite difficult to live in this city without one, and an annual public transport ticket for both me and Geekman would cost more than a car does to run. By quite a lot.

The absolute worst part of buying a car is the negotiating. I have no clue what I am doing. Our friend Jana, who was visiting when we first started test driving cars, gave us the advice that we should begin by pointing out all the flaws with the car, and why it is overpriced, and then make an offer. Unfortunately(?) this car had no flaws. And was not overpriced.

But, watch and learn from the master. This is how my negotiating went:

Geekman, whispering: "I'm going to stand over there in the corner and pretend this isn't happening, okay? Good luck."

Me, to the owner: "Um, yeah. We like it. It's a good car. [Frantically tries to think of any problems with it or features that are lacking. Fails. Moves straight to step two in the negotiating process.] We'd like to offer you $4,500 for it."

Car owner: "Huh. You know, these are listed on Red Book for $7000–9000."

Me, with an inspired, yet traditional comeback: "No they aren't."

[At this point I realise I might be digging myself a hole, because the next obvious step is to pull out the notes I made about the Red Book listing, and while it wasn't $7000–9000, it WAS a range that meant this guy's asking price was totally reasonable.]

Car owner: "You've got to look at the features, anyway. This one has power steering and aircon and a good CD player."

Me, at a complete loss for any further bargaining tactics, also thinking that his price really is quite acceptable: I stare blankly.

[Silence]

Car owner: "Yeah, okay, you can have it for $4,500."

I guess the good thing about buying privately instead of from a dealer is that the seller is likely to be equally clueless as you are.

Now that you have observed my mad negotiating skillz, here's a quick quiz for you.

Imagine you are the seller. Which of the following are NOT selling points, and therefore should probably NOT be emphasised while potential buyers are inspecting your car?
(a) "It's really quite tinny. You get a lot of road noise."
(b) "It's a beaut car, but. It's never had no issues or nuthink."
(c) "I wouldn't drive it on long trips like to Sydney or somewhere. The engine's not really that powerful."
(d) "It runs off a tank of petrol literally forever."


Answers:
(a) and (c) are things you probably shouldn't tell a potential buyer.
(b) is acceptable, and will add to your Authentic Australian cred.
(d) is something I probably won't complain about if it turns out to be truth rather than grammar.

Cryptic

High school flashback

The gym changing rooms today are full of 14-year-olds getting ready for a soccer tournament. Oh the angst! Oh the bitchiness! Oh the "casual" swearing, followed by a quick scan of the room to see if anyone's impressed. Oh the attempts to get changed into gym gear without actually exposing any skin to your classmates.

Actual conversation:

"Oh my god, like, get OVER it."
"Oh my god, like, NO."
"Oh my god, like, YES."
"Oh my god, like, what the hell?"
"Oh my god, like, she said get OVER IT."

Something that never fails to amuse me

The person who is in charge of administering grant money at our university has a surname which sounds exactly like French for "pays well".

Do you know anyone with an exceptionally appropriate (or inappropriate) name?

Caveman with a million dollar view

We were in Sydney in the weekend and on a walk around the coast near Bondi beach, we came across this guy living in a cave amongst the rocks.


He didn't seem to mind people taking photos, although I felt a bit guilty treating him like a tourist attraction. The only information I've been able to find out about him since is this story, which doesn't give a lot of details. The short version is, his name is Jhyim Mhiyles (he likes the letter y because it supposedly represents the trinity), and he has been living there for eight years.

Given that you'd usually pay upwards of a million dollars for a beachfront property at Bondi, I think he has found an brilliant alternative!

Hey, check out my site meter!

This blog just hit 100,000 visitors!

The 100,000th was whoever lives in Wilson, North Carolina, with the IP address starting with 66.26.66, who clicked over from this old post on Everyday Scientist. (You are also using WindowsXP, Firefox, your system is set to English language, and your monitor resolution is 1024 x 768. I know, spooky, huh?)

I'd offer a prize, but since you stayed for 0 seconds and only viewed one page, I can't imagine you'll be back.

This post brought to you by Stalky "OMG I can't believe you can get that much information about me" McStalkerson.

Why yes, a happy new year to you too

So this is traditionally the time of year when I post about how horribly hot it is and how I'm dying of summer, and you all reply that you are jealous.

So let's just take that as read, okay (36 C=97 F!) and I'll find something else to complain about instead.

How about this:

Our neighbours have gone on an extended holiday/moved out/who the hell knows. Their smoke alarm, however, has not. Beep beep BEEP. Every five minutes. I think it's the low battery alarm. If I could break in I would replace that freaking battery for them, but as it is we are doomed to hear beep beep BEEP every five minutes for the rest of our lives.

Including all. night. long.

Three days and counting. If you need me, I'll be the one biting a pillow and trying not to kill anyone.

Beep beep BEEP.

If Jane Austen had had Facebook access...

...Pride and Prejudice might have looked something like this.

(Seen at Hoyden about Town)

On second thoughts, the Hamlet one is even better. I especially like the following lines:

Hamlet posted an event: A Play That's Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family

Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.

Polonius is no longer online.

Ophelia loves flowers. Flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers. Oh, look, a river.

Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don't Float.

At least if the academic career doesn't work out, I'll still be able to eat

One thing that I'm proud of from 2008 is that for the first! time! ever! we succeeded in growing big leafy things on our balcony. This is the fourth year we have tried, and usually by now, the second month of summer, sad little stunted seedlings would have succumbed to caterpillars and neglect, and would be shriveling weedily in their pots, waiting for us to dump them in the bin.

THIS summer, the view out to our balcony now looks like this:


Let's have a little tour, okay?

On the left we have the herb table.

This is mostly a success (especially because I threw out the shriveled, wormy lettuces before taking the photo). The coriander (called something different by Americans, which word escapes me right now) is the only disappointment. It went to seed within a couple of weeks, despite frequent pickings. And now it is covered in aphids and caterpillars and about to win a free trip to visit the lettuces. The chives, on the other hand, are clearly bent on world domination, and the basil grows faster than we can eat it.

Next to the herbs grow the beans.


They too appear to have ambitions of taking over the world, starting next Tuesday. We had to keep lashing on more and more poles to the balcony for them to climb, and now they have truly run out of space and are climbing each other. I think our upstairs neighbours will shortly be very surprised.

Next come the stunt tomatoes.


I call them my stunt tomatoes because they are both stunted, and yet performing feats of tomato production that defy the odds. Compare these to...

...the zombie tomato in the corner:


I do not understand this plant. It is a survivor from last year that kept producing tomatoes all through winter while we were waiting for it to hurry up and die already so we could reuse the pot. We didn't water it for a full six months, yet it did not die.

Its extra year of growth time means it has become bigger and scarier than any tomato plant I have ever seen. I can't reach the top of it even on tiptoes. Again I am forced to wonder what it will do now it has run out of balcony. It also has an unusual growth pattern of spurting up 30 or 40 cm overnight, accompanied by a corresponding die-off of leaves around the bottom. You can see that the leaves are now dead up to around the halfway mark, although the dry brown sticks down are still indomitably sprouting tomatoes.

So all in all I am ridiculously happy with our balcony garden this year. Not only is it pretty and shady (and allergy-inducing), but it is feeding us. We pick the tomatoes and beans every second day, and the container below shows an average haul:


This might be laughable to anyone with a garden or a large family, but it is more than enough for the two of us, and more than my balcony has ever produced in the past.

And now if you'll excuse me, I need to go and quarantine my coriander.

Weather watching: ur doing it rong.

Me: "Look at that rain!"
Geekman: "Yes, I'm watching it on the rain radar."
Me: "I'm watching it OUT THE WINDOW."

***

Geekman: "Are you ready to go for that walk yet?"
Me: "It's still raining!"
Geekman: "Not really. The rain radar says it has basically stopped."
Me: "The window says otherwise, but if you think it's clearing, we could go in a few minutes."

***

We're outside. It's raining on our heads. That is to say, I have an umbrella and appropriate clothing. Geekman is wearing a t-shirt and shorts and getting soggy. He keeps pretending he wants to cuddle, but really he's trying to steal my umbrella.

Me: "The rain radar says you don't need an umbrella."
Geekman: "I don't. It's practically stopped."

The rain increases in intensity.

Me: "Let's just go back to the house."
Geekman: "Good plan. We could stop there briefly on the way to the rest of our walk."
Me: "See, you DO want to get an umbrella and a raincoat."
Geekman: "No, I just need to check to see whether the rain is clearing yet."
Me: "It's not!" (Drip, drip, splash.)
Geekman (sighs): "On the RADAR."

Fa la la la la, heh heh heh heh

We have a stranded American physicist coming over for Christmas dinner tomorrow. I'm thinking it's a great chance to do really weird things and convince him they are Australian Christmas traditions. (He is taking revenge in advance by promising to bring a pumpkin pie.)

So, what are some exciting new Australian Christmas traditions I haven't thought of yet?

I'm not sure if this is more "boy who cried wolf" or "lecturer (me) whose evilness comes back to haunt her"

I was just talking to a colleague and she mentioned a student essay that was just handed in. This might not sound so weird to those of a Northern Hemisphere persuasion, but down here semester finished in OCTOBER and now it's mid summer and Christmas and all.

My colleague mentioned the student's name—let's call him Stu—and I was all, "Oh god, that Stu. I had him last semester and I have never seen a bigger pile of lazy, excuse-manufacturing, plagiarising shit."

Colleague merely raises her eyebrows, so I take that as a cue to keep whining. "He didn't show up until three weeks into the course. Was late to every class. Didn't hand in half the assignments. What he did hand in was 100% off-topic or plagiarised or both. Had a medical certificate for everything: 'Stu cannot sit exams. It makes his eyes hurt. Please find alternative assessment.' 'Stu cannot wipe his ass as he has extremely short arms. Please make sure ass-wiping is not a necessary skill in this course.'"

"So anyway," I continue. "I hope he had a REALLY good excuse for handing in your essay two months after classes ended."

"Well..." begins Colleague, "He did spend the last few weeks of semester in hospital for open-heart surgery. And he has had a lot of complications during his recovery. He said his heart problem has been an issue all year and that he's missed a lot of class and work due to it. I thought it was only fair to make allowances."

Clearly we have different definitions of 'formality'

Geekman: I think my talk at [conference] went pretty well. But I'm worried that it was maybe too informal.

Me: Informal talks are great! I much prefer to listen to someone talking about their research like a real live person than someone standing stiffly behind a lectern and reading off a script.

Geekman: Maybe... but all the same, next time I think I might wear shoes.

At least this way I can imagine it was a charity I actually support

Me: "I just talked to my mother. She said she didn't know what to get me for Christmas and kind of ran out of time, so she donated some money to a charity instead. But she's forgotten which one."

Geekman: "It's the thought that counts... The problem is, she doesn't think."

We grovel abjectly and automatically

I just got the following email from my bank:

Dear customer,

On 24 November 2008, you were incorrectly charged an overdrawn fee on your account. Please be assured that this error was corrected within a 24 hour period and any associated fees have been reversed.

We sincerely regret this matter and unreservedly apologise for any inconvenience it may have caused you. We have taken all the steps necessary to return to the highest levels of reliability and service that you are used to from NetBank.

This is an automatically generated email advice.

Is it just me, or is the combination of "we sincerely regret this matter" and "this is an automatically generated email" a bit of an oxymoron?

In case you're really stuck for entertainment

I just imported a whole heap of stuff I wrote in 2007 into this blog. They were teaching-related posts I put on another, more anonymous blog at the time, and some of you probably read them over there.

If you didn't, and you're stuck for something to read, you'll find them now posted here under the label "teaching", and on dates ranging from July to November 2007.

The generosity of the first half of the second sentence in this email overwhelms me

In related news, we had the following email from our administrators recently:

Dear casual employees,

Due to our recent funding shortages, we are no longer able to pay overtime. You may continue to work after hours and on public holidays if necessary, but please fill in your time sheets as though you haven't.

Regards,
Admin.

For some mysterious reason, I am angry all the time lately

Actual conversation:

Person from the Research Office: "Hello, I'm calling about your application for a teaching innovation grant."

Me: "Hi. Yes, thanks, I received your letter saying I was unsuccessful."

PRO: "Well I wanted to follow up on this. Basically we thought your proposal was a great idea and really important. I think you should go ahead and do it anyway!"

Me: "Without funding?"

PRO: "That's right."

Me: "Well, you see, I'm not actually employed to teach the course in question. The grant application was a joint proposal between me and the guy who IS teaching it. He was willing to let me develop the materials I mentioned, paying me from the funds we applied for."

PRO: "But, you know, it's so important to have interactive online materials for modern courses. And it sounded like yours would have been very effective."

Me: "I agree. That's why we APPLIED FOR THE GRANT."

PRO: "So, you should contact one of our Educational Designers. They might be able to give you the technological assistance you require to develop those materials."

Me: "I don't require technological assistance. I require to be paid some money. So that I can afford my rent. And not have to spend all day diagramming sentences for Microsoft.* [Okay, those last two sentences might have just happened in my head. Not in the actual conversation.]"

PRO: "Your plan was to develop, um, a class blog, right? And wiki?"

Me: "No. Not a blog. The main materials would have been interactive online environments where the students could play around with some real language data, which we were going to digitise from simplified versions of people's fieldwork. There would be built in hints and guidance for exploring it, and relating it to the readings and lectures. [Thinking: if you had actually READ my grant proposal, you would have known this.] We were going to set up a wiki alongside this, so that the students could collaborate on their analyses."

PRO: "Right. A wiki! Yes, wikis are great! So, how about you contact the educational designer I mentioned? She'll show you how to set up a class wiki. It's very easy to do, so you probably didn't need all that funding you applied for anyway."

Me: "I'm hanging up now. Goodbye." [Okay, that last line was just in my head too. Instead I politely re-explained why I wouldn't be pursuing this project (BECAUSE I DO NOT HAVE A JOB HERE. IT IS NOT MY COURSE) and eventually he went away.]

______________

* Looks like this might actually be my new money earner. Big. woo. hoo.

Geekman the Romantic

"I missed you while I was at my conference."

"I'm surprised you had time to miss me."

"Why?"

"Well, you were so busy, and all your friends were there."

"But you're a different class of friend."

"I'm classy."

"You're the thief class."

"What???"

"You steal bits of me... Like my heart."

Compare and contrast

Geekman has just been away at his centre's big annual conference. Let's compare these conferences with OUR big annual conference, mkay? (For the sake of fairness, I'll compare the situation for full time ongoing faculty in our department with the same in his.)

Locations of our big conference the last three years:
2008: Sydney (inner city)
2007: Adelaide (inner city)
2006: Melbourne (inner city)

Locations of his big conference the last three years (actual town names left off, in case of identifiability):
2008: Luxury Australian beach town; famous Australian wine region
2007: Famous New Zealand adventure/skiing resort; famous NZ tourist centre
2006: Famous Australian beach resort region.

Yes, his conferences tend to be multi-location. I.e. it's the same people and topics, they just move location halfway through in order to get to spend time in more exciting places.

Amount of funding/expenses covered

Our department: each faculty member is generously given $200 per year to spend on a conference of their choice! (It might just about cover a registration fee.) Accommodation, transport, meals, other expenses are all covered out of one's own pocket.

Geekman's centre: everything is fully covered. Accommodation, transport, some food, registration, is all paid by the centre. Even for grad students. (As a comparison, one of the grad students in our department was recently INVITED to give a talk at a prestigious conference in the USA, but the dept still won't give her any money towards her expenses.)

Conference amenities

Our conferences:

• Discounted internet access (e.g. only $20 a week instead of by the hour).
• Some free canapes and wine at book launches, of which there is usually one or two per conference.
• If you are young enough, you can probably buy coffee and food on campus at the discounted student price, if they forget to check ID.
• Sometimes there's an official conference welcome session with a little food, but it's always run out before I fight my way to the front of the queue.
• Our conference dinners usually cost $40-$60 a head, excluding drinks.

Geekman's conferences:

• Free coffee and wireless internet from an espresso bar during the day.
• Free canapes and wine every evening at poster sessions.
• The conference dinner is paid for by the centre.
• Sometimes free lunch is included.

And of course the thing that rankles most:

The conference bags

Here's what they gave out at Geekman's conference this year:



Admire, if the photo doesn't obscure it too much, the heavy canvas, the strong zips, the stylish design.

And here's mine:



Yes, it does indeed resemble one of those $1 canvas shopping bags. But it's not quite. No, this is MORE FLIMSY than the shopping bags I use. If you hold it up to the light, it's actually see-through. However, mine contained a PEN. I don't think the physicists got pens. DID YOU, physicists? No. Hah.

Awesome. N'est-ce pas?

I won something on the internet!

I won I won I won I won I won I won!

Blogging is SO not an unproductive waste of time. It can win you nerdy baby items*. And fame. And stuff. (Okay, so maybe not so much with the fame. But I bet there are now at least three extra people in the world who know my... pseudonym.)

Go me!

____________

* Which I'm going to interpret as a sign** that things will work out for Claudia and Rob. Otherwise I wouldn't have anyone to give these to and would have to keep them all for me to stroke and gloat over. (Which, actually, wouldn't be so bad either...)

** Even though I don't believe in signs.

How not to respond to emails: crazy person edition

Dear colleagues,

I am compiling the centre's newsletter, and would like to invite you to email me details of any recent news or publications to include. It would be greatly appreciated if you would format your publication details using an author-date bibliographic system, so that I can just copy and paste them into the newsletter.

Regards,
Colleague X

Colleague X then forwarded me people's responses to this email, as in reality I am compiling the newsletter, not her.


These are actual COMPLETE responses:

1. "Can you put in the details of my tone thingy from last year?"

2. "Wasn't there a student who finished in April? You should include his dissertation."

3. "My paper with [Colleague Y] will probably be published soon."

4. "You could write something about my grant."

5. "Don't forget my conference paper from [Big Conference earlier this year]."

Note to self:

Dear Self,

Even if you are nervous about the contents of an email, reading it with one eye closed and the other only half open is not actually going to make it less frightening. That only works for horror movies.

For email, it just makes things blurry.

Love,
Me.

Learned helplessness: you're doing it... quite well akshully.

Colleague: "StyleyGeek, do you remember how you offered to turn the centre newsletter into pdf?"

Me: "Yes. Have you finished it? Just send me the file."

Colleague: "Well, really, it's so hard to get the formatting right... But I have all the bits and pieces to go in it. It's just they are in separate files. If I sent them to you, would you put them together and then create the pdf?"

Me: "I guess I could do that. It's going on the website, right? I'll pay myself out of the website development budget."

Colleague: "Okay, great. What's best? Shall I zip them up and email the zipped archive to you?"

Me: "Sure."

Colleague: "Okay. So... how do I do that? Could you come along to my office and show me?"

Three embarrassing confessions

(1) When I post a letter, I try to peer through the slot to see if it really went in. Somehow I don't believe that it's sitting there happily waiting for the postman, but suspect instead that it popped off to some extra dimension for a holiday. Perhaps it's a hangover from my obsessive habit of checking my "sent" folder after firing off an email. I don't think I used to worry about letters so much before the advent of the internet and emails that so frequently go astray.

(2) Similarly, when I transfer money electronically, I can't help but obsess that I typed a number wrong somewhere and sent it scuttling into the bank account of some random (but very happy, and probably not Nigerian) stranger.

(3) I have absolutely no idea how big an ounce is, or about its relationship to a pound. Pounds are easy. They are similar to a packet of butter. Except now I can't remember if it's a 500g packet of butter or a 250g packet*. For all I know, though, an ounce might be defined as 3.75 Imperial Wombles.

_________

* which we now buy since our supermarket sells the exact same brand in both sizes, and two 250g packets are cheaper than buying one 500g packet. (Methinks someone else doesn't have a clear idea of weights and measures either.)

Update

Claudia's not pregnant.

Three more frozen opportunities are waiting, but probably not until next year.

New policy

I think students who can't calculate their own grades should fail the course.

I'm not talking about a small flaw in addition here, but a complete inability to comprehend the way the grades add up, leading to a full-scale email war.

Dear StyleyGeek,

I see I got 73 on my final essay. Why is my mark for the course only 68?

Stu Dent.

Dear Stu Dent,

As you will see from the syllabus on the website, handed out in the first week of class, the distribution of marks are as follows:

Assignment 1: 10 marks
Assignment 2: 15 marks
Essay: 15 marks
Weekly homework: 10 marks
Final exam: 50 marks.

Your marks were as follows: [details redacted to protect the clueless]

Therefore your final mark (add these all up) comes to 68%.

Regards,
StyleyGeek

Dear StyleyGeek,

I thought you said the essay could count for the whole mark of the course?

Stu.

Dear Stu,

No, this is not the case. What you may be confusing this with is the policy about the final exam. If a student submits all work on time, AND the final exam mark, as a percentage, is higher than the marks of all the work added together, then the FINAL EXAM MARK stands as the final mark. This is also explained in the syllabus, along with some examples of possible scenarios. Your final exam mark was only 58% (29 out of 50). Therefore it is lower than your total mark of 68% and this policy does not apply to you.

StyleyGeek.

Dear StyleyGeek,

So why don't I get 73%?

Stu Dent.

God, I wish course transcripts had an option where the lecturer could just enter in the grade column: EPIC FAIL.

Wow

So the teaching period finished four weeks ago. Over last three weeks, the students had their final exams, and in upper-level courses, final projects and essays were due. Last week and this week everyone was frantically marking marking marking until—phew—it's done.

Then last night, an hour before final grades were due, one prof in our department emailed all faculty:

Dear all,

In my [undergraduate] course on [X] this semester, I was glad to find the [20] students wrote excellent final essays on interesting topics. I attach scanned copies of them all, as I'm sure you will find them worth the read.

Regards,
Prof. Optimistic.

I wish I lived in his universe, where, after marking all the final essays for your own course, you are eager and excited to read everyone else's as well.

I would like to know

What are people thinking when they label medicine sold in Australia as, "must be stored between 15 and 25 degrees C"?

We don't all have air conditioning.

Okay, this is getting silly

So this time they thankfully didn't do any damage. They just broke in (not hard now that the front window doesn't actually close and the back one still doesn't have any glass in it), and moved our car to a different parking space in our building's garage.

Is someone trying to make a point?

If I shrink my browser window, it makes online banking even safer!

You know how on Firefox 3, secure sites have a green block filling up part of the location bar?

Although I know it's untrue, I can't help feeling like sites where the green bit fills up most of the bar are more secure than ones where it only fills up a little bit.

Good thing my bank has a long name...

I rest my case

A small group of us who are casual lecturers (adjuncts in American terminology) recently received a grant from the university to conduct a survey of early career lecturers across campus, to find out what conditions and resources are like, and what sorts of needs there is for training and support.

One of our main hypotheses was that there are a lot more casual lecturers than the university realises, and that they tend to be teaching bigger courses with worse support and fewer resources than is commonly thought to be the case. We suspected that casual employees fall between the cracks because they are often not around when it comes to departmental reviews; they don't tend to show up in official publications like the university handbook (usually the person the casual lecturer is filling in for is listed as the course convener even when on leave), or in official university statistics.

So we created our survey. It got ethics clearance. We sent it to the university's official survey-putting-up technical people, along with instructions about who we are trying to survey and why.

The survey went live yesterday.

Today I find that—guess what?—surveys by default aren't open to casual employees, and the technical people didn't think of changing this option.

Casual lecturers trying to fill out a survey about whether or not the university ignores them get a pretty little red error message: access denied. Because they're only casuals.

I like the "traveling through time" line best

How to get out of paying your bills. (Or not.)

Final egg update (well, for now, anyway)

When last we left our valiant heroine embryos, 21 of them had successfully fertilized. The reports up until Sunday were quite cheerful, but then the "Scientist" started to be cagey and said calming things like, "We can't tell for sure whether they have stopped developing, or if they're just slow," and "Claudia should come to Sydney on Monday as planned, but we can't say whether the transfer* will go ahead then or not."

The transfer DID, however, go ahead. There WAS a successful five-day embryo to transfer, and three more to freeze.

So although the numbers are lower than we had initially expected, there's a pretty good chance of success even with this first attempt, and a few back-ups just in case.

The doctor who did the transfer was an utter and total wanker, however: rude, patronising and completely unprofessional. The details are not my story to share, but if anyone reading this is considering IVF in Sydney, please email me and I'll tell you who it was and why you want to stay (in a galaxy***) far far away.

__________

* "The transfer" sounds so much less squicky than "The Implantation" (of DOOOOM**).
** Somehow that bit of the sentence just appeared in this post for no reason under my control at all.
*** That bit of the sentence also turned up unexpectedly. My blog posts are now writing themselves. (*rubs hands together in glee*)

A question with no right answer

Reading this post, especially the bit about the "gotcha" approach to a job candidate, reminded me of the worst. question. ever, asked by one of our faculty members in the question time at the end of a recent job talk.

"I was just wondering," the faculty member began, as the (young, clearly nervous) candidate smiled tentatively, "whether the reason you cited my book in the reference list on your handout was just because you found out that I'm on the selection committee?"

Social networking: ur doin it rong.

Geekman enters the room. Cackles. "Someone else has tried to friend me! That will show them!"

"Have you ever thought that you might want to accept a friend request now and again rather than just hanging out in your own corner of Facebook all by yourself?"

"But it's so much fun watching them queuing up for my attention. And being DENIED!"

Warning: ten-mile long post ahead

By the numbers:

• Eggs retrieved: 48
• Eggs successfully fertilised: 21
• Average number of eggs fertilised in an IVF cycle (according to statistics from a different state, though I couldn't find any for ours): 5.5
• Number of hours it usually takes to drive from Sydney to our city: 3-ish
• Number of hours it took us yesterday: 9
• Amount of time spent on side of road, waiting for the NRMA, tow-trucks and our heroic rescuers driving in to give us a lift back: 5
• Amount of furniture purchased by Claudia and Rob at IKEA while in Sydney: 50 metric shitloads (think: entire lounge fittings; entire bathroom fittings; light fittings for most of the house; multiple storage "solutions"... I think they're suffering from premature nesting syndrome, along the lines of, "Oh my god! Our babies will never agree to leave their petri dishes unless they know they will have a house full of pretty IKEA furniture to look forward to!")
• Number of times we* had to load and unload all this shit, due to the above-mentioned breakdown: 4

The retrieval itself was much less unpleasant than I had expected. I was happy and relaxed due to the fact that the car had not broken down on the way to Sydney the day before; we had had a fun trip to IKEA, followed by a fancy dinner at an Italian restaurant (OMG: seafood risotto with entire crab lurking underneath***), and a night in a swanky 5-star hotel.

We arrived at the hospital at 8am, as requested, to find they had lost all our paperwork. So spent the next half hour filling out forms that we had already filled out twice before, which was not entirely so awesome.

Then came flappy gown and silly bootie time.

The surgeon came and talked to me, followed by the anaesthetist, followed by—wait for it—The Scientist. Yes, she was introduced to us as "The Scientist" (and looked suitably embarrassed when we pointed out that at least three of the four of us were also scientists by any definition) and no, I never got clear exactly on what her role was. I guess she was in charge of the actual fertilisation and babysitting the developing embryos. But introducing her as "the Babysitter" might not have sounded quite so impressive.

My memories of the operating theatre are a bit hazy, but I do recall surprise at how many more people were present than I would have thought necessary. I'm still not quite sure what that was about. Maybe they all wanted to see superwoman with her over-active ovaries. The surgeon was nice and held my hand and talked to me about IKEA until I went under. The last thought I recall was being baffled about the lack of stirrups. I still don't quite see how the mechanics of the retrieval could work without stirrups. Weird.

I woke up an hour and a half later feeling really quite lovely, thank you very much and isn't codeine wonderful? Someone had stuck a post-it to me that said "48", which is apparently the new way to communicate with patients.

It wasn't long after that that they let me go. I was supposed to wait until I'd absorbed a litre worth of IV fluids, but I drank three cups of coffee while waiting and they decided that would do the job instead. (Go caffeine addiction!) So then we moved on to the next stage of our adventure: hanging out on the side of the road, not even a third of the way home.

Hanging out of the side of the road not even a third of the way home:

The first thing to go wrong was that the van's engine cut out. On the highway. At 110 km per hour. We trundled onto the shoulder and Rob spent the next hour under the van**** having repeats of the following dialogue with Claudia:

Rob: "Turn the ignition on and rev it until the engine dies. Then turn it on again and repeat."

Claudia: "Okay."

[VROOM rev rev rev rev splutter. VROOOM]

Rob: "OWW!"

[Claudia turns the ignition off.]

Rob: "No! Turn it on!"

Claudia: "But you said 'ow!'"

Rob: "I need you to keep turning it on!"

Claudia: "Even when you say 'ow'?"

Rob: "It's only a bit of electrocution."

Eventually they got the engine going long enough for Rob to disconnect the starter motor while leaving the van running, as the starter motor seemed to be part of the problem. So at that point the engine stayed on as long as the ignition key was pressed firmly to the right.

This meant Rob had to drive with one hand while holding the key in the "on" position with the other.

And this led, in turn, to an exciting manoeuvre (again, on the motorway at 110km per hour) where I, from the passenger seat, had to take over the steering while Rob attacked the ignition barrel with a screwdriver. While driving. At 110 km per hour. On the motorway. Did I mention 110km per hour?

Finally the engine died again and was totally unrestartable. Which is where the tow truck came in. Unfortunately the tow truck would only take us as far as the next town, 17km away, because the nice man from the NRMA was unable to diagnose the problem given the huge number of IKEA flat packs that were wedged above the spot in the van where the engine lurks. (Yes, I know: engine underneath a seat: not the smartest design in the world.)

So then followed a pleading phone call to one of Rob's grad students, who was persuaded to check out the department truck ("Reason: picking up lab supplies") and drive 200km each way to come and get us. I felt vaguely uncomfortable about such shameless exploitation of one's students, but damn, I felt more uncomfortable about sitting in the middle of nowhere all night.

I won't dwell on the rest of the trip back, but suffice it to say there were false starts, wrong directions, and a severe shortage of rope for tying the load on the back of the truck down with. There was also one passenger recovering from a small operation (whee, hi, codeine is my friend!), one with a migraine, and one in the initial stages of flu.

Awesomeness.

Claudia documented every step of the trip home with her camera, and fully intends to use these pictures as the opening pages of her future offspring's baby albums.

Which is kind of awesome, really.

Also: 21 embryos!

In conclusion, I like codeine. Thank you.
_____________

*I use the term "we" loosely, because ha, one of us just had an operation and was lying back peacefully on a picnic rug on the grass** while everyone else did all the work.

**I use this term loosely too, since actually we were on the gravel shoulder of your typical Australian motorway, and the closest thing to grass was a few patches of thistles and mountains of peeling eucalyptus bark. Also a few dead and rotting animals, and suspicious numbers of feathers. Ah well, the whoosh-whoosh, whoosh-whoosh of passing traffic was a peaceful soundtrack for the whole experience.

*** How does one eat a crab anyway? I was presented with a nutcracker, a long thin poky-stick, and a finger bowl. I cracked and poked and splashed and really made very little progress. But it was fun trying.

****They're experimentalists. Bodging dodgy mechanical stuff together is what they DO.

So it's Wednesday (because I have scary ovaries)

22 follicles ready to go, and another 21 undersized. For those keeping score (so, um, none of you, I guess), that's around three times the average number. No wonder I feel like someone inserted a freight train in my abdomen.

Fortunately I did manage to find people to make the conference run smoothly. No single person will be present for the whole thing, but I'm thinking of it as an experiment in distributed organisation. Surely if for every session there is someone who is ultimately responsible, nothing can go wrong, can it?

(Except between the sessions. And lunch and tea breaks, while important, are not the MOST essential part of a conference. Except when you're a grad student, I guess.)

Ooops

So the egg retrieval was meant to be Friday. Turns out, I'm responding extra-specially well to the medication. (Yay me.)

They're saying Wednesday.

Crap crap crappity.

On Wednesday, I am running a conference. All day. I'm being paid to do this. And I can't for the life of me think who would be able to take over. Everyone I know is either presenting at the conference, or only able to be there for part of the day. Someone is going to have to set up, pack up, herd presenters and session chairs to the right places, deal with any technological problems, liaise with the caterers, put out any fires, kiss the appropriate arses...

And in case I didn't mention, the egg retrieval is in a different city. So it's definitely an all-day thing. Maybe even a drive-up-the-night-before sort of thing.

I have no idea how I'm going to sort this one out. Let's just hope my follicle growth slows the fuck down, okay?

A tale of prescience and impressive judgment

Back when I was in fourth form, a friend of mine who even then had political ambitions walked into Labour party headquarters, tackled a then-minor party member, and attached himself to him like a sycophantic limpet for the next decade. By doing errands and being a sort of general assistant/intern, this friend of mine hoped to (a) get insight into how politics worked, and (b) end up close to a man who my friend claimed would one day be prime minister.

We made a lot of fun of him for that. That guy? Prime minister?

My friend still hangs around with him.

And today in the news, Helen Clark resigns leadership of the Labour party, and "that guy" looks like he'll be taking over.

Heh. I hope you're feeling vindicated, my friend.

Liveblogging the NZ election

(Because what could be more thrilling to readers than an election they don't care about in a country they've probably never heard of?)

Friday 7th November: 2:30pm
Oh shit. Places where New Zealanders in Australia can vote probably aren't open tomorrow, are they? And I still can't download my freaking papers, since the electronic geni(us)es can no longer find me on the system. I'd better go vote.

Friday 7th November: 2:49pm
Well that was easy.
Now what?

Saturday 8th November: 3pm
I wonder if anywhere in this city will be showing the election coverage live on a big screen? Or, you know, at all? I could do with being drunk and patriotic in public.
I google "nz election party" + [this city].
Hah. Yeah. Bad search combination. I mean the OTHER sort of party, Google!

Saturday 8th November: 5:30pm
The polling booths in NZ closed at 5pm our time, so maybe there'll be something to blog about now.
Ah. Yes. Okay.
I think it's already over. 3.5% of the vote has been counted and National is well in the lead. Even ACT looks like it's going to romp into a seat or two or five.
Farewell, Helen Clark. I liked you quite a lot, akshually.
Shortest. Liveblogging. EVER.

Saturday 8th November: 5:39pm
I quickly write a blog post that isn't really "live" at all. Unless you are some sort of time traveller. Shhh! Maybe no one will notice.

Saturday 8th November: 5:43pm
I read back through this post checking for typos. Am horrified to see that Blogger underlines "Zealanders" as a spelling error. It suggests I change it to "Philanders" or "Colanders". Fuck you too, Blogger.

SPECIAL BREAKING NEWS: Saturday 8th November: 6:09pm
They haven't counted my vote yet, the bastards. I know this because I went to look at my electorate details and under "votes counted" it lists "special votes: 0".
They'd better count it before declaring a victor; that's all I have to say.

Saturday 8th November: 9:29pm
Clark concedes and it's all over. National will be forming a government together with ACT (gah).
They've counted my vote now, apparently, but it didn't help.
The silver lining is that NZ First not only didn't make the 5% threshold, but they didn't get any electorates this time around, either. Poor little Winnie...

Also, WTF?

The New Zealand accent: you're doing it wrong.

Does anyone else remember Rainbow?

I was having a nostalgic browse through old kids TV shows on Youtube today (inspired by Flea's mention of The Electric Company). And then I googled Rainbow.

Did everyone but me already know about this episode? It shows Zippy, George and Bungle in a whole new light...



(Supposedly it was an episode the cast and crew made as a private joke, but that then escaped and made its way onto the (adult, thankfully) air.)

Congratulations, America!

I'm so happy for you.

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker?

At the pub the other night I spent a long time watching the table across from ours, trying to work out what discipline the group belonged to. I'll warn you now, I don't have an answer, but I'm soliciting guesses.

Clues:

1. There were two old guys who looked like they should have retired long ago, both wearing casual clothes (jeans and t-shirts) and both with extreme amounts of white facial hair. I'm guessing they were the profs.
2. Then there were nine young people. All but one were female. They all looked like they were in their early twenties.
3. Every single one of the young women was wearing black. At least on top. Funky yet expensive-looking. And large, sometimes ethnic-looking jewelry.
4. They all had short-and-funky haircuts.
   
5. They were talking in groups of twos and threes, and while the conversations sounded friendly, none of them ever smiled.

So, it's a discipline where most students are female, but the profs are male. It's not law, because they weren't wearing suits. They were too dressed up to be anthropologists, and wearing too much black to be most sorts of scientists that I could recognise. And they take themselves too seriously.

So, history? Literature? Philosophy? They looked unhappy enough to be philosophers...

What does your radar tell you? Who do you think they are?

Things that make you go EEK

It would appear that I should, indeed, have expected the unexpected. And the unexpected was having to get up early too many times in a row, and freakishly long needles.

There have been three times since I started this egg donation process (despite over-exposure to corny counselor-speak, I refuse to call it a 'journey') where something inside my brain went HOLD ON WAIT WTF WHY ARE WE DOING THIS AGAIN EXACTLY UM NO THANXKBAI.

The first was, weirdly, when the IVF specialist was telling me about when I should abstain from sex (no, wait, this isn't the freaky bit), and then she said, "And you know, if you were to get pregnant during this, the kid would be Rob and Claudia's baby's half-sibling... Of course, that will be the case if you have kids one day, anyway."

And I was all, WHOA, DUDE (although actually, just now typing this I was all, "WHO—no, wait, that's a different word—WHAO—now that just looks wrong, um—WHOO—fuckit, let's just go with DUUUUDE"). Because although I had assimilated the idea that I would be genetically related to Claudia and Rob's kid, I hadn't made the really-not-so-far-akshully mental leap to the fact that we were creating partial siblings for my future potential OFFSPRING. Weird.

The second DUUUUUDE moment was when my ginormous parcel of medical freakiness turned up on Friday. It was like Christmas! Only with more injectables.

So really only like Christmas if you're a heroin addict. A heroin addict with unhealthily enabling family members. Who live far enough away that they post you your presents in a box instead of spending Christmas with you. Or maybe they don't like you enough to spend Christmas with you because you're all hyped up on drugs, haven't washed your hair in six months, and are likely to steal their purses when they turn their backs to baste the Christmas turkey.

Let's stop this analogy now and look at a picture instead.



Now, leaving aside that the packet insert for the injection lists the ingredients as "follitropin beta rch, produced by a Chinese hamster [...]" (I kid you not), the thing that really disturbed me was the following:



These are six (SIX) blood draw requests, each stating that they need to happen at 7:30am, on the other side of the city. This is the bit no one told me! Daily injections? Yeah fine, whatever. Various doctors' appointments? Okay. People poking around in your girly parts with something sharp? If we must. But getting up before 7am every day for a week??? NO THANKS. (Don't worry: I'll do it. But I'm not going to like it.)

And the most recent squeaky brain moment (I bet you saw this coming; what can I say? I'm far-sightedness challenged): the injections. Did you read that bit above about, "Yeah yeah, injections are no big deal, whatever"? That was the mindset BEFORE I saw the needle. See, I know the meaning of the word subcutaneous. My cutaneous doesn't go very deep. So I was guessing there'd be a little teensy tiny short stabby needle. I can jab things in. No worries. (Mate.)

Behold! The MOTHERFUCKING OH HOLY SHIT NO LET'S NOT needle. (With finger, for scale).



Now, I bet you're thinking, "Oh, that's not so long. My [splinter/acupunture equipment/dead grandmother] is longer than that!"

But you see, that's what's known as a skewed sense of scale due to the fact that you aren't plunging the freaking thing straight into your stomach. Let me quote from the instruction manual: "insert the entire needle straight into the skin".

Saturday night was the first time I had to do this. For ten minutes I sat there looking at the needle, looking at my stomach, turning hot and cold and hyperventilating and thinking LET'S NOT DO THIS, OKAY? OKAY?

And then I did it.

And it wasn't so bad, except for the bit where you have to leave the needle in for five seconds afterwards and your hand is shaking and you have visions of the sharp bit blithely wandering back and forth through important internal organs and shredding them into pieces. Except not really, because it can't do that. Right? Right?

Or like yesterday when you stick the needle in and then realise you aren't holding the "pen" (nice euphemism guys, but really, it's fooling no one) in a way that lets you reach the button to press to actually make the dose come out. So you have to pull it out, rearrange, and try again.

But tonight was better. In fact, tonight, I injected myself in the middle of this post and you didn't even notice, did you? Hah.

I was kind of randomly wittering on here in the hope that I would spontaneously type something clever that nicely rounded out this post, made it sound like there was some sort of overall point to it, and tied the end cleverly back to the beginning. But I think we've all realised that's not about to happen.

So, um, okay. Bye.

New voting policy

I think in this election I'm going to vote by a process of elimination. Any party whose website has annoying flash-based graphics, or that uses the word incentivisation is getting crossed off my list. So is any party that lists as one of its priorities "breath of life from our ancestors."

I've pretty much decided what I'm doing with my party vote. But I'm worried about my electorate vote. (Well, not seriously concerned, because it's not like Brownlee isn't going to win no matter what I do.)

Usually as a matter of course I would give my electorate vote to Labour, since the smaller parties' candidates have no chance of winning in Ilam, and Labour needs all the help it can get. But this election, their guy's profile doesn't inspire me in any way that doesn't involve getting seriously stabby with a red pen. I'm perfectly aware that you can't judge a person's intelligence by their competence in a second language. But you can judge them for not caring enough or being self-aware enough to employ a good editor. "There area good mixed of people in this electorate."? "Our Labour Lead Government give the Health back to all New Zealander."? AND I'm not convinced that "raise enough funding to run next year campaign" should appear in your list of what you want to achieve in your term as MP.

On the other hand he does seem likely to be a good advocate for immigrants and minorities (not merely because he is one himself, but judging from the line under "services" where he offers help dealing with the Immigration Department, and translation/interpretation in seven languages).

Incidentally, as today's internet surfing consisted in equal parts of reading American blogs talking about the US election, and reading up on the NZ election to try to make a decision, it struck me that North Americans usually talk about whether they will "vote for Obama" or "vote for McCain". You hardly ever hear about NZers talking about "voting for Clark" or "voting for Key" (admittedly, you sometimes hear someone say they are "voting for Helen"). But generally NZers seem to talk about voting for a party, rather than for a person.

This reminds me of a plan I had a while ago for what I'd do about elections if I ran the world.

For a start, I'd let people from other countries vote too, since especially with big countries like the USA, the election results have a huge impact on the rest of the world as well.

But I would also require that presidential/prime minister candidates remain anonymous—no one would know until after the election the candidates' gender, race, or personal background. No one would get to hear them speak directly. Journalists and even the general public could put questions to them just as they do now, and the candidates could still debate each other, but it would all happen from inside some sort of black box, with voice distortion.

I wonder if that might force people to actually vote based on policies, rather than personality. What do you think?

One begins to wonder what the point of a lock-up garage is.

Me: "Goddammit! The bastards broke into our car again.*"
Geekman (showing an astonishing lack of observation): "How can you tell?"

I point at the window right in front of him that has been smashed in, and then the little door that covers the petrol cap—except that technically I'm NOT pointing at the door that covers the petrol cap, since it is missing.

Geekman: "Oh, right."

We giggle. Because we are deranged.

Geekman: "It's funny. I'm not even mad this time. Just resigned."
Me: "Yeah, me too. It's like, that's just what happens to our car."

We resignedly inspect the car for further damage, and find that the lock to the boot also no longer functions. Nothing's been stolen. It would appear that the morons removed the petrol cap door without actually stealing the petrol (despite a full tank). They tried and failed to get into the car through the boot (obviously not registering that the front passenger door no longer even HAS a lock thanks to the last break in). And then they smashed a window, but didn't take anything.

They did, however, thoughtfully leave the lock from the petrol door thingy sitting on the back seat, just in case we need it for later.

I briefly consider starting a museum of all the loot car thieves have left us (current count: two pairs of scissors, a screwdriver, some paper towels, and a lock).

Me: "Do you think we should still take the car to the gym, even with the broken window?"
Geekman: "Why not? If someone steals it, at least we won't have to pay for repairs."
Me: "But you know how we were going to pick up the case of beer left in your department?**"
Geekman: "Yeah, let's do that after the gym, not before."

Because clearly it doesn't matter if someone steals our CAR, as long as we still have a case of beer. You see, then we can drink until the pain of being carless goes away, right? The logic is flawless.

I'm going to spend the afternoon making a sign to put in the car window that says, "Please don't break into this car (you bastards). There is nothing worth stealing inside, and we are not insured."

That'll work, right?

____________

* When searching to find this earlier post to link to, I googled StyleyGeek + broke into our car. Google helpfully suggested, "Did you mean: StyleyGeek broke into your car?" For the record, I would like to state that StyleyGeek has not broken into ANYONE'S car. Thank you.

** The case of beer was left over from a physics department LAN party on Friday night. I think this means we have now joined the inner geek circle. Geekman in particular seemed proud of his mastery of the 1337 lingo, as demonstrated by the glee on his face when, with a look of concentration, he looked up from his computer and tried out phrases like, "I fragged your dudes!" and "Pwned, noobs!"