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Rhiannon. Revolts. It's that simple.
7/15/2004
Chapter the Twenty-Seventh: Insanity Lite Title refers to concept by Emily Colas. Still no sandals. Mom's volunteered to buy me some new ones...I'm just quite upset that mine are bloody GONE. If someone steals nasty old sandals, what else will they steal? Nearing the end of another day at work, which has been very quiet, save for one woman. This woman's boss is hell-bent on proving just how single-minded The Powers That Be are. She is scanning pages into text so that she can remove the personal information to put on the web. Her boss, Unnamed Bureaucrat Who Is In Australia (Probably On Vacation), insists that this information be in a Word document format. It must be. She attempted to convince him that she could just make copies, whiteout the information, and put the pages in a PDF file...but no. She MUST scan all of the documents into Word, KEEPING THE FORMATTING (and fixing it if it's not the same as her hard copy), remove all of the critical information, and save it as multiple Word documents. For those of you who aren't into this sort of thing, suffice it to say, this takes hours and hours of extra work. Formatting does not scan perfectly into Word when one is doing text recognition. It's impossible for your average Joe scanner (this is an HP 5550, decent but not the best) and a networked Pentium 4 running XP to do, really. I don't think the tech is out there in broad release that one can save formatting and text, at least not for a collegiate general computing lab. So, the next time you're wondering where your tuition dollars go, remember--it goes to me, it goes to her (who's going to take triple or quadruple the time to do this), and more so, it goes to the Stubborn Bureaucratic Asshat who's on vacation. And I'm certain it's like this at other schools. By the way, saving the files as PDFs would be a far more standard format and more easily and widely read throughout the Internet. But why do it the easy way? I don't know about you, but sometimes I really wonder about the people upstairs. I know, I know, I should expect this kind of shit, and I do. It's just when one comes face to face with it that it becomes such an issue. 7/14/2004
Chapter the Twenty-Sixth: Mostly a LiveJournal Rehash Someone stole my sandals. Now, you have to understand, this does not happen very often on Smith campus. I've known things to sit around for days on end before the owner realizes he/she/ze is missing something and picks it up. Or the custodians throw it out. In T--- House, things rarely go missing. There was the laundry incident at the beginning of last year, but that was not a pair of $35-$40 dollar sandals. Also, Smith students are on the honor code, which is also why stealing doesn't happen too often. It can get you in deep shit if you break it. The question, of course, is Who Would Want Used Smelly Size 11 Sandals? I think I've lost my faith in Smithies. The reason I forgot to pick up my sandals in the first place was because I was drinking. Now, drinking is generally a Bad Idea on weekdays, at least where I'm coming from, but I seem to be doing all right (except for the sandals) today, and I needed to be social anyhow. Most of us who were drinking were drinking relatively normal alcohol...Mike's Hard Lime and those Jack Daniels punch drinks that come in bottles. L, who is a very different sort of person (but in a good way), and who is an aspiring vegan, was drinking vodka, which she was mixing with blue Gatorade. I am not sure what flavor this Gatorade was marketed under, but I'm sure it tasted very...blue. We had not been drinking for more than five or ten minutes when L decided that she didn't just want to have vodka and Gatorade, but that she wanted to add something to it. So, for some reason unknown to the rest of us, she put rice milk in it and stirred it with her finger. She then sipped some. L had created the most vile thing I had smelled all day. My description was 'rancid Rice Krispies', and for the sake of you who might be eating or drinking something while watching this, I'll spare you some of our cohorts' comments. Yet L drank all of it, saying it tasted 'pretty good', and further proving that college students will drink anything, generally. I suppose this is our Smith equivalent of frat type drinking (see the Bourgeois Pig! entry on keg stands). Somehow, I really don't think I'd do very well within a block or two of a frat house. As for me, I'm going to stick to my Maxwell House Coffee Singles, which I am drinking, ghetto-style, out of a plastic cold cup, and get back to reading Battle Royale. Not the manga, not the movie, the actual novel. Like L's drink, it's not something you want to be consuming while eating. So why am I drinking coffee? That's anyone's guess. |
