~Tuesday~ I was at the city bus stop at 7:47, where I I found the sidewalk tore up.
A girl walked out of a nearby townhouse just as the bus pulled up. People don’t usually come out of those townhouses to board the bus or do anything else actually, because it’s actually the back of their place. These are the places where Riley’s owner used to step out with him in the mornings.
The bus arrived at 7:52, and being that it wasn’t the 8:15 bus, Hot Mess Driver was not at the helm, for which I was grateful.
Exercising Asian Man was at the next stop, and it made me wonder what criteria he uses to decide whether to catch the bus there as opposed to the stop by our place. As he is wont to do, once aboard, he took out some work-related papers to read. He never wastes a minutes of his time, and I also wondered if he has the kind of job where he can count the time he spends on the bus “working” in his eight-hour day.
At the Gorman/Conifer stop, a bunch of college kids ran past our bus, presumably to catch the Wolfline bus that was presumably behind us. Don’t get me started again on buses not having rear windows.
A girl sat across from me wearing turquoise-navy-black plaid pants that ended just below the knees and had little pull ties on them there to secure them. She had a paperback, Variety Puzzles, with her.
I concentrated as much as I could at work, it being my last day physically there, as I’m working from home tomorrow, and then heading to Charlotte to catch my evening flight to Key West from there.
I attended the Master of Science in Technical Communication capstone project oral defenses this evening from 6:00 – 7:30, which was held in a room that was way too small, which only adds to the awkwardness of it all. I’m always amazed when there’s such a chasm between intellectual intelligence and emotional intelligence.
I have been attending the defenses on and off, mostly on, since I graduated in December of 2007. It always brings back memories of my night at the front of the room, being terrified during and incredibly releived at the end of myp presentation and like I had “arrived” by the end of the evening when I heard, “You’ve passed with no further work required.”
Over the course of the time I’ve been attending, I’ve only been able to ask one question of a presenter, which has mostly been due to time constraints. I did get to ask one of one of the presenters tonight, and I’m going to capture it here for posterity.
The presentation was about an article that provided eight best practices to an audience (management) on how to communicate with a group of people they might hire (web developers). The author of the article noted that she had divided the web developers into novices, experienced, and experts. The article was to be published in a management magazine.
My question was, “Since the audience of the article is actually the managers, did you at all consider delineating the management audience, say into, new vs. experienced managers, managers of private enterprises vs. managers of public enterprises, and so on?”
Two of—what I would think most people familiar with the program would agree on—the “heavy hitter” professors were consultants tonight, and as expected one of them asked the most well-prepared, well-articulated, and academically challenging questions.
I knew two of the three presenters, but only both tangentially, and they were the two who presented first. The third presenter, who I didn’t know, created missionbombshell.com, which one of the professors pointed out was geared toward younger women, and asked, “What about elderly bombshells?” to which I quipped, “Small audience.”