Thursday and Friday were Reading Days at Carleton. I love reading days. You never know quite what’s going to happen.
Goodsell becomes R2-D2
On the last day of classes (Wednesday), students decked out our observatory like R2-D2, complete with recorded sound effects. It was kind of fun to wake up the next morning to Minnesota Public Radio’s Cathy Wurzer talking about the prank during Morning Edition.
Then the whole campus seems to have taken a breath on Thursday.
Mass Spooning for Posterity
Then on Friday they decided to reprise the Silent Dance Party in the Libe (as seen in this amateur documentary).
But there was a lot of Friday yet to fill, and nobody really wanted to study any more, so breaking a Guinness World Record seemed the thing to do. Before yesterday, only a measly 432 people had ever participated in mass spooning. Thankfully, that pathetic record has now been shattered. 529 students saw to that. (Which, by the way, is more than a quarter of the student body… er… population.)
I didn’t get to see R2-D2 in action (he was dismantled disappointingly quickly). I did, however, wonder what all those people were doing lying down in the Bald Spot yesterday as I walked to the student union to get coffee. And then I forgot to wonder about the people lying down when everyone’s attention was diverted by the streakers.
While all of that was happening, the investment team that manages our endowment was receiving an award for the way they handled things recently.
So yeah, busy times here this week. But today, everything’s much more serious as finals get underway. The library is full of people studying and people getting ready to say goodbye and people saying goodbye. The end of Spring Term is always bittersweet.
I’m having trouble caring about the gigantic oil spill in the Gulf.
It’s not that I don’t think it’s horrible, or huge, or likely to have catastrophic effects. Quite the opposite. My problem is that it’s so horrible and huge and potentially catastrophic that I can’t wrap my head around it. It feels like science fiction.
Tin Man Oils the Gulf Coast (by me)
I don’t know what that many hundreds of thousands (or is it millions? or more?) of gallons looks like, in water or oil or any other form. I don’t think I’ve even ever seen crude oil. I’ve never been to the Gulf Coast, so it’s easy for it to seem like a fictional place wracked by too-big-to-be-non-fiction storms and larger than life tobacco plantations and Mardi Gras parties. It’s a place I’ve only seen in movies, only read about in books and newspapers. It’s like the moon.
And so, just like missions to the moon, it seems like something that only Other People can deal with. But unlike missions to the moon, this problem has never been solved before, which makes it more like a mission to an as yet undiscovered galaxy. Any solution seems too ineffectual, too removed from my sense of reality, to make any real difference. And all this makes it too easy for me to just dismiss trying solutions at all, which isn’t a helpful attitude, for sure.
Unfortunately, my conscious brain seems to have very little control over the unconscious part of itself that says “this is too much to be true.” And so I listen to NPR every morning in a state of suspended disbelief, knowing that this thing is science fiction but caring about it in the same way that I cared about Gandalf or Aslan or Lauren Olmina.
After six months of dutifully refreshing the buyer’s guide at MacRumors every day, Apple finally announced the upgrades I was waiting for last week. Woohoo! Well, except that now I’m poorer. (Apple’s next innovation should be inexpensive merchandise.)
So everything was going swimmingly, and I went to bed with visions of Mac-ish sugarplums dancing through my head. Particularly Mac-ish webcams and SD card readers and multi-track mouse pads. And Adium. And 10-hour batteries. Oooh the 10-hour batteries.
Oh, right, batteries. I’d heard somewhere that they weren’t end-user replaceable any more, and while the website says they’re supposed to last the “average user” 5 years, I’m not really an average user. I’ve typically gone through batteries quite a bit faster than battery manufacturers expect. And then I’d heard someone mention that you could buy some service when you first purchase the laptop that will cover you if the battery dies early. Better call about that, because I don’t remember seeing anything like that as an option when I placed my order.
So, the next morning, I dialed the customer service number.
Or, I thought I’d dialed the customer service number, but the voice on the other end was telling me about distinctly non-computer-related services. Services that require you to be 18 or older to call. Services that, had this been on the web, “safe search” would have kept from showing up in my ill-advised Google search. It took me longer than you’d think necessary to process what I was hearing and the options available to me were I to press 1 to indicate that I’m old enough to participate in these services without making the, er, “customer service personnel” on the other end into felons.
Surely I’d dialed correctly. I squinted at the phone’s read-out while the automated voice waited for me to get over my cold feet and press 1. The number looked right. Every one of the last four digits was correct and in the right order. I hadn’t dialed 866 or 888 instead of 800. And then I saw the problem. 4s and 7s are very close together on the keypad, and I’d dialed 646 rather than 676.
That’s when I realized the automated woman on the other end was reiterating the services she could make available to me. Ack! I hung up quickly and considered disinfecting my hands. And the phone.
Apple, Inc (by me)
Instead I very very carefully dialed the Apple customer service number. This time the voice on the other end welcomed me to the Apple customer service line and informed me, “I am an automated system that can handle complete sentences. So tell me, how can I help you today?”
“I have a question about the macbook I just ordered,” I told him, wondering just how good this sentence understanding was.
“I can tell you about your recent order,” Mr. Customer Service responded cheerily, and proceeded to read off the items on my recent order and their order status.
When prompted, I told him that of these three items, I had a question about the Macbook.
He then proceeded to tell me about that order, and its order status, and asked if I had further questions.
“Yes, I have a question about the Macbook’s battery,” I clarified, wondering why I kept up this pretense of speaking in complete sentences to a computer.
He then proceeded to tell me about the Macbook order again, just as cheerily as the first time but with no new information, and then asked if I had further questions.
“Customer service representative,” I said, dispensing with complete sentences entirely.
“If you just said something, I didn’t quite catch that. Please speak a little more loudly,” Mr. Customer Service suggested.
“Customer. Service. Representative.” I enunciated clearly and loudly.
“I’d be happy to connect you to a customer service representative,” at least he didn’t seem to have had his feelings hurt. “One moment please.”
When the connection went through, the human on the other end of the line said a couple of sentences that sounded like they should have made sense to me. They sounded exactly like sentences, and I could even tell which were the dependent and the independent clauses, but I couldn’t wrap my brain around the actual content of the sentences.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t understand any of that.”
“Oh, you must have dialed into the Spanish line by mistake. But don’t worry, I can help you anyway.” And she proceeded to tell me that I’d luckily and unknowingly already signed up for the service that would cover me in case the battery isn’t up to my abuse.
I wonder why Mr. Customer Service thought I would like the Spanish version. I suppose he thought that if, despite his advanced sentence-understanding capabilities, I hadn’t been able to make him understand me, I must have been speaking another language to begin with. Or maybe his feelings were hurt.
My supervisor and some woman were waiting for me when I walked in the front door today. That in itself would have been unusual enough to warrant a post, but as it turns out, the woman’s name is Iris (also incredibly odd, and only the second time I’ve met another Iris), and she and her husband were living in Japan at the same time as my parents, and her husband and my dad were roommates in the same Tokyo high school for a year. Crazy!
So now I’ve met both of them and their three sons (the oldest of whom is considering coming here for school).
I don’t know what it is about this town. My dad’s best friend from grade school is living here, too, and teaches at the College Across The River. It’s far too small a town, in far too remote a location to make all of this sound plausible.
Just for some context, my dad really did learn Syriac this past summer, grew up in Japan, Indian wrestles on occasion, has a fedora, and was long ago nicknamed Indiana Jastram by his students. And yes, I’ve taken a class from him in college. And it was hard.
