~Monday~ I caught the Wolfline #9 Greek Village bus up at the Gorman Street / Kings Court stop. Just before the bus arrived, this cute, petite Asian girl walked up to the stop in an outfit that made me think, “Are you a student or a French Maid?”
I’m quite sure if I were straight, I’d’ve found this outfit as racy as the construction worker who drove by in a white pick-up truck, caught her out of the corner of his eye, and whose head did one of these:
It’s fairly obvious as you can see below, but just to be clear (pun fully intended), that bottom half of her skirt is black, see-through netting with what looks like a white, lace doily draped over the upper part of it. And, yes, that blouse does slightly resemble a corset. And not to be catty, because I’m totally not a fashionista, but I think black boots would have been a better choice. Kudos for the fringes on the side, though, which you can’t really see in this picture, but which added a little cowgirl, sort of French-Maid-Goes-to-the-Rodeo, aura about her.
And below, there she is being all that with her “Coach” purse—which, caught up in her persona, I at first thought said, “Couch.” And although that’s a pink water bottle in her hand, to add yet another dimension to this ignis fatuus, it could easily be mistaken for a baby bottle with a big pink nipple.
I had a good day at work, spent mostly editing a 50-page recommendation, a task force deliverable about the future of e-mail for faculty and staff at the university.
I appreciated it, because the author—who is a manager in our Help Desk area—has an undergraduate degree in English Literature, so it was very well-written. This allowed me to concentrate on doing a technical edit—which is enough work in and of itself—and less so on doing a copyedit, so editing for things such as:
- Accuracy
- Clarity
- Purpose
- Audience (for example, technical, laypeople, “insiders,” students, faculty, staff)
- Context (for example, will the information be accessed on a laptop, on a mobile device, in a dimly lit room, under stressful conditions?)
- Completeness (for example, if a task is involved, are all steps covered or considered?)
- Concreteness (for example, are examples provided for complex concepts, and are they appropriate for the audience?)
- Style (for example, “e-mail” or “email,” parallel construction, “NC State” vs. “NCSU”)
- Organization (that is, is the information divided into, and presented in, a logical sequence?)
- Retrievability (that is, does it facilitate scanning, navigation, searchability, and contain a table of contents or an index?)
- Visual effectiveness (for example, legible fonts, clear and appropriate graphics)
- Task orientation (that is, is it written from the user’s perspective and is the reason for reading or doing a task clear?)
For dinner, I had another portion of a fully-cooked rotisserie chicken I bought at the grocery store yesterday, with a side of mashed potatoes that I also made yesterday to finish up the rest of that 5-pound bag of red potatoes I bought last week. Yum. Yum. Yum.
I met Joe at Caribou Coffee at Duraleigh and Edwards Mill, where I arrived at 7:00, a half-hour earlier than our scheduled meeting time. I nabbed two small tables already pulled together and near an outlet.
Within hearing distance (poor them), a middle-aged man sat with a teen boy for whom he was evidently acting as some kind of mentor. From what I could hear (and you know I was listening), they shared some kind of religious affiliation, although they didn’t go to the same church. The man faced away from me, and in large, Gothic font the word “Disciple” was nailed across the back of his shirt. Under that on the left side, a chapter and verse number of Luke was referenced, and on the right side, some chapter and verse number of John. It was just the numbers, not the text of the verse.
I wanted to “butt in” to the conversation a couple of times, especially when the mentor told the kid who was going to NC State in the fall, that “they have some kind of career group there, some special career line, or something like that.” I wanted to say, “It’s the University Career Center.”
Then the kid asked him if he thought trying to get a co-op job would be a good idea, and the man said, “Yes. That would be great. You need to ask your advisor about that. He has access to stuff like that.” I wanted to say, “Uh, that would be the Co-op Office that would help you with that.”
The mentor brought up a PowerPoint presentation for the mentee, and on one slide (not that I was looking), there was a play on Michaelangelo’s The Creation of Adam that looked something like this:
which I interpreted to mean, “While god is all well and good, it’s going to take a computer to really create a life for yourself.” And with that said, you can see that it was best that I did all I could to successfully refrain from being a Buttinsky.
I was happy to have my attention diverted from this scene once Joe arrived. For the third time at Caribou, when I bought my coffee the barista asked if I wanted a medium, because “it’s cheaper than a small.” I mentioned this to Joe before he went up to get his, saying, “Why is a medium always cheaper than a small? Why not just reprice them, or just not sell smalls?”
“I’m going to find out,” he said heading up to the counter. Turns out that the medium-cheaper-than-a-small special is every Monday night, and that just so happens to be the night I’ve met Joe there the last three times.
Also, on their huge chalkboard where they advertise, they were selling two pounds of a certain brand of coffee for $30. Next to the price, they had chalked in, “World’s best coffee. Ask us why.” Not being a coffee connoisseur at all, I can’t imagine any coffee worth paying $15 a pound for. I buy the freeze-dried store brand for $2.50 a pound whenever I can.
We closed the place down at 10:00, and once home I wrote and posted Sunday’s blog entry before hitting the sack.