~Tuesday~ I drove over to Avent Ferry and Gorman to catch the Wolfline #1 Avent Ferry bus down to the Mission Valley Shopping Center stop, which is across the street from the building I’ll be taking a training class in all day today and tomorrow.
Fortunately, I left enough time to endure the unbelievable 20 minutes that passed without one of the three buses I could’ve caught to get to my destination coming by—the city’s #11 & #11c buses, and the university’s #1.
Yesterday at work, I expressed concern about the return on investment potential of my taking this class, and by the end of the day that concern was not at all alleviated. This two-day training is on how to use a product that’s going to be used to manage Macs at the university, something I don’t do. The thought process was that it would be helpful for me to know what’s involved in this process in case I have to communicate about it to campus or to write some documentation in support of it.
I had trouble getting connected to the network from where we were supposed to download the software, which timed out three times, with no message about why. As it turned out, I had a typo in the URL. As my fellow salon members would ask, “How would I know?”
The manager who wanted me to come to this class asked a lot of questions of the instructor and explained a lot of things that the instructor either couldn’t explain or didn’t know the answer to because the answers depended on how we have things configured in our environment.
Late morning, I got an e-mail from my boss asking for my status report from last week, as she was going to be meeting with her boss in the afternoon.
Before leaving for lunch, I tilted down the lid on my Mac—which you’ll remember I just got yesterday and I’ve never used a Mac before other than my 30-minute lesson after getting it yesterday—but I didn’t close the lid or put the machine in sleep mode or anything.
When I returned, the display was totally black, and no combination of anything that I know to try on a computer would make it come back on. I sent no less than seven instant messages to people I know who use Macs to see if they had any advice, and I couldn’t believe that for at least 15 minutes not one of them responded. What are the chances?
My friend and colleague, Garrison, suggested that I try removing the battery for a few seconds to see if that did anything. I flipped the machine over and looked for anything that looked like it could possibly be housing a battery, but found nothing. When I flipped it back over, and held the start button down again, it started booting back up.
I have no idea what did it. I did notice once it finally came up that the power indicator was at 0%, so I’m guessing that somehow I ran the battery power down to zero. I’m still not sure how or why, though, as the thing was plugged in the whole time, including when I left for lunch and when I got back and was trying to get it to come back up. Crazy.
Overall in this class, I thought the instructor said, “I don’t know,” “I don’t think,” “I guess,” and “I’m not sure,” way too many times. I mean, isn’t this the reason we pay a vendor $1500 or $2000 a day to come on location to teach a class? So we get people who know the answers? If he was fazed by not knowing, he sure didn’t show it.
That so reminded me of my days working for Verity, making that outrageous $110,000 a year salary that I was making, and never feeling anything but fear and trepidation that my customer would ask me questions that I’d have to respond to with those very phrases, which is the primary reason why I list that job as one of the worst, if not the worst, job I’ve ever had.
Not that anyone cares, but in my profession, this hedging language has been categorized by Jeanne Fahnstock as “Type 1 statements— those phrased as conjecture or speculation.” And a person’s ethos is inversely proportional to the number of type 1 statements they use. But I digress…
In a move that I thought about a lot, I posted this status update to Facebook, to which by the end of the day, I’d received several responses to, both online and offline.
We had our 2011 Gulf Coast Alternative Spring Break Trip full team meeting tonight, during which we covered details of the trip, such as our itinerary, a packing list, and taking some suggestions for our meals.
At one point, we were talking about bringing games with us, and when talking about the game Taboo, and potentially mailing it down with our linen so it wouldn’t take up so much room in someone’s luggage, a student said, “You could just take the cards out of the box and just pack those.”
While everyone’s mouth sort of just hung open in a “D’oh” kind of reaction, I quipped, “Talk about thinking outside of the box.”
Miriam, sitting next to me, uttered under her breath, “That was brilliant. Really.”
The elevators on campus are pretty much all provided by the same company, including the one in my building and the one in the student center where our meeting was, and I can’t help but think whenever I get in and see it, “That’s so Gai.”
After the meeting, I spent a little time at Helios, where a guy who was in my grad school linguistics class was standing and talking with the cashier for a little too long with a customer (that would be me) waiting.
When she finally acknowledged me, and was getting my coffee, I said to him, “It’s Dan, right?”
“Yes. How are you doing?” he replied.
“Fine thanks. Have you finished your PhD yet?”
“No, I have one more year. I’m done with classes. It’s just time for me to get started on my dissertation,” he replied.
“Oh yeah? And what’s your topic? How to work women baristas in your local coffee shop?” I smiled.
He laughed a little too much, which to me was an acknowledgment of having been busted, and then uttered one of those intellectual sentences that give me instant wood. It was something to the effect of: “I’m actually looking at researching a correlation between sea piracy and software piracy in terms of its contextual juxtaposition…” Sproing!
At 11:25, I stopped by Legends where an 11:30 drag show that was promised on the Legends Facebook account was nowhere near ready to start. Evidently the heating wasn’t working in the Spotlight Theater, and one of the drag queens standing next to me at the bar was complaining about how cold it was in there.
“That’s so your nipples’ll get hard,” I said.
To which she quipped, “And what am I going to do with them once they are? Put ’em in a bag and take ’em home?”
At about 11:45, right before the power went completely out in that section of the club, they made the announcement, “15 minutes to show time. It’s 15 minutes to show time.”
In my head I responded, “It’s one minute to driving home time,” and that’s exactly what I did after gulping down my drink.