Irony is the Shackles of Youth

I am watching a group of ghost hunters on a show. It's kind of creepy (I really should not watch this when I'm alone, but that has never stopped me). However, the thing that annoys me the most if these people are walking around at night, often see/hear movement in grass/forest/bushes, and their first thought is "It's a ghost!" while my first thought is "It's a wild animal, you dumbass."

I have to admit, I am highly amused when something happens and the group gets so worked up that they start having to bleep them. :D

Today I had my very first recruiter that cannot read call my cell. The conversation went something like this:

Recruiter: I'm Bob from Recruiters-R-Us. May I speak with Tsaiko?
Tsaiko: This is she. How can I help you?
Recruiter: I saw your resume on the internet. I have a position that I want to speak with you about. Do you have time?
Tsaiko: Sure. I was just doing some work on my thesis.
Recruiter: You... haven't finished your thesis.
Tsaiko: No. It should say on there that my thesis won't be completed until July 2009.
Recruiter: Oh. Oh so it does. But is says looking for employment by July.
Tsaiko: Yes it does. I'd like to have something lined up as soon as I complete my Master's. In July.
Recruiter: Well, I'm afraid this won't work out for you then. But I will call you if I have any other positions that come available.
Tsaiko: That's okay. I look forward to hearing from you about other positions.
Recruiter: You have a nice day.

So I need to change the wording in my objective to says "Looking to start in July." Because obviously the "Master's Degree: To Be Completed in July, 2009" and "Unavailable to start until July, 2009" isn't enough for some people. Not that I think this will even slow them down...

The guy up in the lab completely didn't read the email I sent him about printing my poster. He just assumed it was one of my fellow graduate student's poster. So not only did he set it to print on the wrong paper (meaning I can't make notes on it like I wanted to), he also set it to the wrong size and the wrong print quality. So now it's not only compressed, but the ink is smeared all over the glossy paper I didn't want him to use.

Then, he had the nerve to say "I don't understand why you didn't make the poster in Power Point." BECAUSE IT'S A SHITTY PIECE OF SOFTWARE THAT IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE USED TO MAKE POSTERS YOU JACK ASS.

SON OF A BITCH.

Today miome and I were heading towards campus: me to finish up the thesis report that WILL NEVER DIE and her to head to work. It was snowing pretty heavily. They originally said 1-2 inches, but there was 2+ inches by the time we got to campus and it was still falling. It was falling so heavily that it really was difficult to keep it from building up on the windshields. We had to keep the heater on full blast to keep it from freezing.

While stopped at a light we notice a yellow sportscar next to us. All of a sudden, the woman driving it opens the door, gets out in her nice business dress, and starts cleaning off her back windshield of snow. The problem? She didn't put the car in park. So now her bright yellow sportscar is rolling forward towards the car in front of her.

Miome and I just stared. Surely, she will get back in her car and put it in park. Right? Right? Of course not! This woman decides that the best way to stop her car from rolling forward is the grab the spoiler and pull back while she cleans off the windshield. Does this stop the car? No! Now the woman is snow skiing behind her car in heels at the grand pace of 3mph.

Less than foot from the car in front of her, woman clears her back windshield. She then hustles around to the open driver's side door, jumps in, and hits the brakes. Accident averted. The light turns green and she is off.

We decide that it is wise to hang back and not get in front of this woman.

Last year, a new student center was opened on campus. The only thing I like about it is that there's a skyway (aka gerbil tube) between the building I'm in and the student center. This means I don't have to go outside if I want something to eat/drink. It looks really impressive but is very, very poorly designed. How badly designed you might ask? Let's just say I cannot believe that an architect allowed this design to leave his desk and am totally amazed that it was approved.

One of the major design flaws is that the relatively flat roof overhangs the walls by about 10-15 feet. The edge of the roof is beveled in an almost triangle shape. It looks really nifty, but there's a problem. Because the edge of the roof slopes down, ice and snow tends to slide down it onto the ground below. This is fine every where except where the roof edge overhangs the sidewalk. Then you get people being hit with icicles/snow from four stories above.

The school wasn't going to do anything about it. I think they might have to now. Three pieces of ice fell off the roof today. One swung inwards and shattered a two story high window on the student center. Two other pieces hit the gerbil tube and shattered the exterior panels. Luckily it did not punch through, but if another piece falls it will. And heaven help anyone who is in the tube when it does.

I wonder if this will cause the university to fix the (very expensive) design flaw. I wouldn't bet on it though. That would mean that they would have to admit there was a mistake. I have the feeling that it's going to take someone getting hurt before this gets any attention. All I can do is make sure it's not me.

I am so irritated at this moment. On Mondays and Thursdays, I commute to a town about a 1-1/2 away from where I usually work to do my internship. I don't go every Thursday, but this week I had to. miome wanted to go down to this town as well to do some work with colleagues that worked there, so we decided to commute together. This would also give us an excuse to eat at some of the restaurants and see some of the sights of the town that we keep hearing about, but never get to try/see. She sent an email to her co-workers letting them know what was going on.

One of her co-workers replied with "Great! I need to go to town as well. I'll commute with you."

Do you see the problem in that reply? The problem is that there are no questions. Nothing along the lines of "Do you mind..." or "Is it okay if I..." or even "Can I..." Nope. Just the assumption that he can come with us.

Miome asks me about it, and I agree that he can come on one condition. We have to leave campus no later than 7:25, because I cannot be late to my internship. He agree to this condition. All is set.

The day before we are to go, he emails Miome and wants to know if we can leave town by 3:30pm. He has an appointment he forgot about and need to be back so he can go to it. Miome asks me. My internship is more flexible about when I can leave, so I agree. Not thrilled, but I can swing it.

Day starts. The drive there is pretty uneventful. I go through my day and keep in touch with Miome. I also fill out my time sheet so I can get it signed quickly when I need to leave. It starts getting close to 3:30. I start wrapping up my work since I need to transfer files to my thumb drive and once I do that, I can't work on those files any more, and I don't want to make co-worker late for his appointment. I shut get everything ready at 3:30 and am chatting through gchat with Miome. Where's co-worker? She doesn't know. Five minutes go by, then ten, then fifteen. Miome gets off the computer to go find co-worker. I get my stuff together and go outside to wait since they are only a few minutes away.

At 4:00pm, they show up. Co-worker was in a meeting that ran long. Did he bother to let Miome know what was going on? Nope. She just had to wait and couldn't tell me whether I could keep working or not. I'm not thrilled. If you ask if I can leave work at 3:30, I am going to be understandably upset when you yourself are not ready to leave at that time. That was thirty minutes I could have been working and getting paid.

It gets better.

We get on the road. About half-way to our destination we hit traffic. Nasty traffic. Seems they are repaving a whole section of road and traffic is backed up because of it. We sit in said traffic for about 30 minutes. Seems like co-worker is going to miss his appointment. He's got a new puppy and this is a vet appointment for the puppy's second round of shots. I mention that he's probably not going to make it.

"Oh that's okay. My girlfriend can take the dog. I was just hoping to be there."

Wait a minute. You mean you asked both me and Miome to take off time from work after you invited yourself to commute with us so you could go to an appointment you didn't actually need to go to? An appointment that was, in fact, optional? No wonder he wasn't worried about the meeting running late or him not making the appointment! To say I was peeved at this point was an understatement.

We finally get back into city around 5:45pm. All we have to do is drop off co-worker and then we can go get something to eat because silly me, I thought we were going to be leaving at 3:30 and would be able to eat early so I skipped my afternoon snack. Both Miome and I want him out of the car.

Co-worker decides that instead of going through the side streets we should get on the belt line, because of course the major highway around the city that everyone uses would certainly not be crowded during rush hour. -_- Idiot. We get stuck in even more traffic to basically get on the highway for a grand total of two exits before getting off. Why he though this was a good idea I'll never know.

We got him out of the car and were both starving and cranky. A quick stop by a truly awful KFC fixed most of that, but did nothing to improve our moods. Never again.

I swear, I am going to beat someone in the financial aid office with a STICK!

I think everyone and their brother by now has heard about LJ/6A and their adult content filter. Fine. Whatever. I'm not going to adult filter any of the entires. I feel it's not my job to watch other people's kids, especially when anyone regardless of age can walk into a bookstore or library and purchase/checkout erotica or hardcore romance. The web is no different from any other publishing medium. I give warnings on it and that's it (which is better than some books I own have done).

However, I know that other people feel differently and I respect that. For those of you who want to restrict your stuff, go for it. I might get a tad annoyed because I have to verify my age, but I don't begrudge anyone for feeling differently in this than I do. It can be a very personal thing for some people.

So I go to reset my viewing options so I can view "adult content" and "explicit adult content" without having to see and click on the damn "This entry may contain adult content" link every time (FYI: sometimes it boots you to a 404 error page and you have to go back and click on the comments to see the entry). Those options: grayed out. WTF?

Finally, after some digging I discover that the reason I can't change the settings is because I haven't put in a year in the birthday field of my profile. When I first got an LJ you had two options: display birth date or don't. I didn't want my age displayed, so I left off the year. Now I can only display the month and day, but I still have to put in a year if I want be able to view adult or explicit content.

I don't want LJ to know my age. I clicked the little button when I signed up saying I was over 13. I did my part. I don't want to have to do anything more. Why should I?

So I hope all of you will join next April 26th as I celebrate my 107th birthday. At my age, I should be able to read whatever I damn well please. XD

I am so pissed I could cry (again).

Dell sent me a new laptop. It arrived today. It is useless. Seriously, I have a very expensive paperweight. The problems?

First, it's about four inches wider, a good inch thicker and 3-5 pounds heavier than my last laptop. My last laptop was not a small laptop by any stretch of the imagination. I got my backpack laptop bag in the largest size possible and my previous laptop barely fit. Even with it fitting, it was heavy to carry around. This means that the new laptop will not fit. I can't carry it around in my hands either because it's so heavy that if I try to carry it one handed to do anything, it will bend my wrist back. That is if this thing didn't completely throw my back out.

The keyboard? Impossible to use. It's so far back that my arms/wrists bang into the lower part of the laptop when I try to type. Why is the keyboard so far back? Because the only way to control the curser is with the touch pad. There is no track point. While this might not be a problem for most people, I do map digitizing and AutoCAD on my laptop. I need it to be precise and I need to be able to use the keyboard at the same time as I move the curser to get my work done. It's impossible to do that on that thing.


I can't type on the replacement laptop, which means no writing. I can't do any of the school or work on it either. The only thing I could do would be surf the web and hell, I'd be better off with a desktop machine if that's all I wanted to do. At least then I could arrange the keyboard so that I wouldn't hurt my arms typing and I'd have the added bonus of a nicer machine to boot. But that's not what I need. I need a computer that I can take to my classes and actually use.

Fuck. I hate Dell at this moment.

So last week I got a card from NC reminding me that it was time for me to renew the registration of my vehicle for Wake County. Considering I now live in Indianapolis, this was something of a problem. I've been putting off getting my car registered in Indiana for long enough. Time to see what it takes to get an Indiana license and registration for my vehicle.

Oh. My. God.

The number of hoops I have to jump through just to get my car registered is mind boggling. I have to get the VIN inspected on it? And produce a Certificate of Origin? How do I obtain that? And of course, the licensing office neglects to explain. You have got to be kidding me.

Let's not even talk about getting my driver's license. I have to get a copy of my birth certificate (which has been misplaced during one of the moves my mom made because I sure haven't seen a copy of it) from CA because that is the only form of identification the BMV will take. Sigh.

This is already proving to be more trouble than it's worth and I haven't even started yet. -_-

Where have I been the last few days? Well, I made the mistake of getting a game called Zoo Tycoon for PC. Hehehehe. Yeah, there goes my evenings. And I really should be working on my Halloween SMP story instead. ^^;

In honor of the game, and to get miome and myself out of the house, we went to the Indianapolis Zoo. It was smaller than the one in NC, but that doesn't surprise me. It's near downtown Indianapolis. What was I expecting? While the animals were great, the people were simply something else.

Now keep in mind, I come from North Carolina, also known as prime redneck country. I would regularly go to the county fair, which as Jeff Foxworthy once said is where you go if you ever want to feel good about your family. I have seen the most backwards, ignorant people, close-minded people you could ever meet from North Carolina in my life. Indiana has them beat hands down.

I'm talking about people that were walking, talking poster children for stereotypes. Mullets. Missing teeth. Dirty clothes. Smoking despite the five million "This zoo is a smoke free area." To give you an example, we were in the forest section of the zoo. One of the exhibits had a muntjac. Miome and I were at the exhibit, looking at the deer. Up came this family. One guy repeated the name "muntjac" five million times like the word was the best joke ever. Another joked about how he wished he had his hunting rifle, but then again there was enough antler on it to make it worth while. Still another guy kept asking about making it bark, how did you make it bark, when was it going to bark, like the deer was some trick dog there for his amusement. The shining, crowning moment of this encounter was when grandma, in her haste to see muntjac, literally pressed against Miome until she was forced to move or get felt up even more by this old lady. Holy cow people. I swear the deer isn't going anywhere. You can wait a few seconds for us to move.

I wish I could say this this was an isolated incident. It wasn't.

For a laugh or two, here are a few of the funniest incorrect statements I heard people say at the zoo:

- People trying their best to figure out what the guinea fowl were. They were in a large enclosure with a variety of a variety of African animals, and there was no sign saying what they were. People called them chickens, ugly peacocks, and my personal favorite, emus.

- The guy who upon seeing the greater kudu, especially the male with his spiral horns, promptly said they were mule deer. WTF? What kind of mutant mule deer have you been looking at to mistake those two?

- The one lady who thought the marabou stork was a pelican. Like the mule deer guy, I'd love to know what kind of mutant pelicans you've been looking at.

- There was the usual bunch of yahoos who took one look at the african wild dog and promptly announced that it was a hyena. This happens at every zoo I've ever been to. Sigh.

- The guy who kept telling his kids that the rhinos were being hunted to extinction over their tusks. Not horns, tusks. I about hurt myself not laughing.

- Lorikeets getting called canaries.

- The lemurs being called "monkeys" is pretty standard as well. I've had to correct myself a time or two when I first see them from a distance or when I forget their name and my mind picks the first thing it can come up with. The ring tailed lemurs getting called chimpanzees? That's a new one on me.