Quick Internet update: after several more rounds of phone calls, Telstra finally sent the modem. It arrived yesterday. Unfortunately, we don’t have an active phone line to plug into it. Why not? Nobody knows. Telstra is supposed to send somebody out to determine what the problem is on Monday. I’m not optimistic about this getting resolved soon. It’s weird how difficult it is to give Telstra our business. We want to give them money (probably foolishly). We actually contemplated giving up with Telstra and trying a new company, but decided against it. If we start over with the other big provider that we know of, what are the chances that they are going to be any better? (Is Verizon any better than Comcast, or vice versa?) We probably would just go through the same bullshit we already went through, and just be less far along in the process. If we go with a smaller provider, we have been told that, ultimately, it all comes back to one of the big providers, anyway, as the smaller ones just piggyback on their networks.
Anyway…
I moved offices. Before I was sharing with one Ph. D. student which wasn’t bad, but now a second Ph. D. student has moved in and it got bad. One is OK, because if you don’t talk then it’s quiet, because your officemate has nobody to talk to. With two they can talk to each other, and it is basically impossible for me to work if two people are having a conversation a yard away from me. So, I moved out, and now I have my own office, which is good, but it’s two floors down from where all my colleagues sit (which is why I didn’t just go there in the first place) which sorta sucks, especially if you are relatively new, because it’s harder just to pop in and ask people things, and you get left out of the loop more easily.
For example, every Thursday a group of people in the department go out to dinner. I was planning on getting in on the fun, so a young professor F, whom I’ve gotten to know a bit, said he would give me a ride around 6:00. So come 6:00, I go up to his office, but hear him in a meeting with my “boss” N in her office. I can’t very well disturb their meeting, so I go back down to my office. Every few minutes, though, I walk up near N’s office and crane my neck to hear if they are still meeting. I do this until about 6:30 and then think, “Screw it. I can’t do this all night. I’m just going to wait in my office and work until he comes down to get me.” At 7:00, he still hasn’t come, and the next bus for a long time is coming in five minutes, so I pack up, go up to N’s office, which is now closed and quiet, and leave.
I find out later, that of course, he forgot I had moved offices (despite me sending him an email that day about it), went to my old office after his meeting, found it locked, thought I had tired of waiting and left, so he just went to the restaurant without me. Obviously, this wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t moved offices, but it also wouldn’t have happened if I moved into a new office on the same floor, because I would have heard him leaving his meeting and knocking on my old office door. That’s the danger of having an office two floors down.
Anyway, he was very apologetic about it the next day (and the night it happened actually, he called our mobile once he realized his mistake), but I just told him “no worries”, and then we had a good conversation about the play of cricket. It sounds sorta cool. Kind of like baseball only longer (a match can go six hours a day, for five days), with more “bunting”, and less power hitting, so basically like baseball with the least desirable things about baseball emphasized.
F (who’s a Kiwi) and another professor J (who’s Australian) told me about a famous cricket match, Australia vs. New Zealand in 1981. New Zealand was on their last hit and needed 6 runs to tie the game – this is the most you can score in cricket on a single hit. (To get “a six” you have to hit the ball over the boundary. It’s similar to a baseball homerun.) Unlike in baseball where you can continue to bat until you have three outs, in Cricket, you usually have a fixed number of “at bats”, so this was the last chance for New Zealand – a six or they lose. The Australian captain then had his bowler (who incidentally was the captain’s brother) roll the ball on the ground underhand (or underarm as they apparently call it here) making it impossible to hit for any distance. Although this was technically not against the rules, it was apparently so unsportsmanlike, that it rocked the international cricket community. (It must have been a big deal if it is well-remembered nearly 30 years later.) In reading the Wikipedia entry on this incident, my favorite quote is from the New Zealand PM at the time Robert Muldoon “it was an act of true cowardice and I consider it appropriate that the Australian team were wearing yellow”. Ooh… diss! There’s just no reply to that.
Anyway…
I moved offices. Before I was sharing with one Ph. D. student which wasn’t bad, but now a second Ph. D. student has moved in and it got bad. One is OK, because if you don’t talk then it’s quiet, because your officemate has nobody to talk to. With two they can talk to each other, and it is basically impossible for me to work if two people are having a conversation a yard away from me. So, I moved out, and now I have my own office, which is good, but it’s two floors down from where all my colleagues sit (which is why I didn’t just go there in the first place) which sorta sucks, especially if you are relatively new, because it’s harder just to pop in and ask people things, and you get left out of the loop more easily.
For example, every Thursday a group of people in the department go out to dinner. I was planning on getting in on the fun, so a young professor F, whom I’ve gotten to know a bit, said he would give me a ride around 6:00. So come 6:00, I go up to his office, but hear him in a meeting with my “boss” N in her office. I can’t very well disturb their meeting, so I go back down to my office. Every few minutes, though, I walk up near N’s office and crane my neck to hear if they are still meeting. I do this until about 6:30 and then think, “Screw it. I can’t do this all night. I’m just going to wait in my office and work until he comes down to get me.” At 7:00, he still hasn’t come, and the next bus for a long time is coming in five minutes, so I pack up, go up to N’s office, which is now closed and quiet, and leave.
I find out later, that of course, he forgot I had moved offices (despite me sending him an email that day about it), went to my old office after his meeting, found it locked, thought I had tired of waiting and left, so he just went to the restaurant without me. Obviously, this wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t moved offices, but it also wouldn’t have happened if I moved into a new office on the same floor, because I would have heard him leaving his meeting and knocking on my old office door. That’s the danger of having an office two floors down.
Anyway, he was very apologetic about it the next day (and the night it happened actually, he called our mobile once he realized his mistake), but I just told him “no worries”, and then we had a good conversation about the play of cricket. It sounds sorta cool. Kind of like baseball only longer (a match can go six hours a day, for five days), with more “bunting”, and less power hitting, so basically like baseball with the least desirable things about baseball emphasized.
F (who’s a Kiwi) and another professor J (who’s Australian) told me about a famous cricket match, Australia vs. New Zealand in 1981. New Zealand was on their last hit and needed 6 runs to tie the game – this is the most you can score in cricket on a single hit. (To get “a six” you have to hit the ball over the boundary. It’s similar to a baseball homerun.) Unlike in baseball where you can continue to bat until you have three outs, in Cricket, you usually have a fixed number of “at bats”, so this was the last chance for New Zealand – a six or they lose. The Australian captain then had his bowler (who incidentally was the captain’s brother) roll the ball on the ground underhand (or underarm as they apparently call it here) making it impossible to hit for any distance. Although this was technically not against the rules, it was apparently so unsportsmanlike, that it rocked the international cricket community. (It must have been a big deal if it is well-remembered nearly 30 years later.) In reading the Wikipedia entry on this incident, my favorite quote is from the New Zealand PM at the time Robert Muldoon “it was an act of true cowardice and I consider it appropriate that the Australian team were wearing yellow”. Ooh… diss! There’s just no reply to that.
No comments:
Post a Comment