(no subject)

[felis_ultharus]

Spent half my workday trying to unearth the attendance for a course where a teacher had made pretty much every mistake it is possible to make. It was more like forensics than administration.

I won't bore you with the specifics, except to say that part of the task involved reconstructing the hours during a pay period from secondary sources, to see if a particular page had ever actually existed or not.

The experience probably rendered me very slightly hysterical, because when I finally sat down to write the report card, and saw the teacher's notes, I couldn't stop laughing for five minutes.

See, under "Course Content," we usually get a list of grammatical structures studied or activities done. More verbose teachers will list every single verb tense, while the terser ones just mention things like "simple past and present, all forms."

This teacher felt only two items were relevant for a 70-hour, 6-unit course:

1. "discussed the difficulties of getting used to a new pet."
   
2. "talked about the relative merits of nigh owls and early birds."

"Nigh owls," by the way, was her mistake, not mine. Yes, it was a spelling mistake on an English report card.

And I know what she meant, of course, but I couldn't help but wonder what a "nigh owl" would be. All I could think of was "Repent sinners, for the owl is nigh!"

Comments

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain. I'm doing data entry for on-campus conferences this summer. Each conference is supposed to have 1. a conference number; 2. a set of numbered registration cards, which also go with their meal cards, if they have on-campus dining; and 3. an index card that has the above two things on it, the range of the numbers on the cards, the full name of the conference organization, and the check-in/check-out dates.

So far I have run into two conferences that have none of the above. And one for which we inexplicably have half the number of cards as attendees. And two that have duplicate conference numbers. And another for which no billing is yet possible, because we have a stack of cards and none of their paperwork, such as the pages that tell us whether they were a youth conference or an adult one, and whether they got bed linens or not.

There's also the little matter of the desk clerks not bothering to mark things like 'male' or 'female' on the cards, or not filling in the room number. *I* can tell gender from the Dutch names, but my co-workers are going to look at things like "Nieltje" and be completely lost. And the room numbers are just completely hopeless.

On the other hand, I get a lot of knitting done at work. A lot. You don't by any chance want a blanket, do you? ^^;;;;

[rougemacabre.livejournal.com]

Oh, knitting! Cool ^^ How fast can you knit? I saw this Chinese lady on television knit a scarf in under five minutes... it was really cool looking. She was supposedly the fasted knitter in the world or something.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

Apparently pretty fast, although I'm also told I type mad-quick and I don't feel especially fast at either. A Hogwarts scarf, which is 80 stitches x 22 rows x 19 stripes, on a size 7 needle, takes about 20 hours to finish. And I ought to know, because I made no less than seven of the damn things a few years ago for Halloween costumes.

A bedspread for a single bed, 300 st x six skeins of yarn + borders, took me probably three weeks of work shifts, where I was probably knitting 20 out of the 25 hours I worked weekly.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the offer of the blanket, but I've got quite a few right now -- more than I use ^_^

But I think data entry is difficult no matter where you're working. Problem is, people think data entry clerks are just being anal when they ask for details, and meanwhile someone on the other end is freaking because they don't have the information.

We don't ask for gender on any form, which I usually think of as enlightened -- except when I suddenly have to write a report card for someone's employer from a teacher's rough notes, and don't know whether to use "he" or "she."

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

We only really need gender because we are running a "hotel" of sorts in the summer, and most conferences would pop a sprocket if we gave them co-ed suites. (The rooms here are meant for four people, two rooms of two, in each suite that shares a bathroom. They're indescribably tiny. In a suite by myself gives me perhaps the space of a SMALL studio apartment.) Thus, when we get a roster that involves a lot of names the staff has never seen before, like "Ad" and "Neeltje", everybody flies into a panic. I just last night got a batch of cards for a conference of mathematicians and much of the paperwork has panicked pen scrawls on it because nobody could figure out whether two of the names (one Chinese, one [Asian] Indian) were male or female.

Being not a complete 'tard, at least not yesterday, I figured anybody going to a mathematical conference was probably a mathematics professor somewhere. Five minutes and GoogleFu gets me their CVs, which say they're male. Why nobody else did this, I have no idea.

[Interesting email alert that was, on this comment -- forget to log out our housemate first, did we? ^^;; I was confused for a minute or two...]