People Watching by Keller Williams

I’m sitting in the library tonight, and I’m writing my paper. I’m using a computer in a well traveled part of the library so there are plenty of distractions. I’ve got to keep my subconscious occupied, or else it’ll distract me even more than those folks who are around me.

Anyway, in this lounge, there are two water fountains, right next to each other. One has a button to press and turn it on, and the other is sensitive to a person moving in front of it. Neither works very well. The sensor on the second fountain is a little flaky, so even if you stand in front of it, it may not turn on. You can even put your hand right over the sensor, and the fountain won’t budge. The first fountain has a sticky button, so even though it will turn on, it is difficult to turn it off.

After someone’s attempt to get a drink from the sensor fountain failed, they moved on to the button fountain, because they were in such a rush. So they got their drink, and started to move away, and noticed that the water was still running even thought they were not pushing the button. They glanced back and gave it a second to understand this, and kept walking.

The button fountain stayed on for ten more minutes, and nearly one hundred people walked by it. Every single person noticed it, but no one tried to understand or fix it. Some made little jokes to their friends, “Its a ghost.” Other people actually went up to get a drink from the sensor fountain. (this just confuses me…the other fountain was already on! why not just drink from it?) Despite the fact that the sensor fountain was right next to the button fountain, they didn’t bother playing with the button fountain or try and turn it off. So for ten minutes this went on, while the three of us sitting in the lounge looked on in amusement. Finally, one of the other two people in this lounge decided to leave, and on their way out, turned off the fountain.

(more…)

Keilbasa by Tenacious D

So, I’m no longer working at the Center for Survey Rsearch and Analysis, and I’m happy about that. Wasn’t a bad job, but it was pretty stupid. Easy, but stupid. So while I was wasting time waiting for the end to come, I remembered one my favorite exchanges that I had with someone on the phone.

We have these questions that are asked at the end of every survey, no matter what the subject of the survey was. One of these is ‘How many phone numbers do you have?’. The question is trying to ask about landlines, but its phrased badly enough that it confuses a lot of people. The worst of which went as follows:
Me: “And how many phone numbers do you have?”
Her: “What?”
Me: “How many phone numbers…landlines. How many landlines do you have?”
Her: “…None.”
Me: “No no, phone numbers, how many phone numbers do you have?”
Her: “Oh. Seven.”
It took me a second to realize what she had said, and a little more to realize what she meant. I sigh and mark her down as having one.

There are other stories, but none of them work well if I was to retell them. It isn’t a very funny job, you need to make your own humor.

I had a really difficult time starting phone calls after I realized that once my opening line became lazy, it changed from “Hi, my name is John” to “Hi, my name-a-John” in true Borat fashion. That’s the first thing I say, and I had to keep from laughing for a while afterwards.

But its over now. On to bigger and better things.

Walletsworth by Umphrey’s McGee

So its Spring Weekend again here at UConn, which always confuses me. I don’t understand it. At all. Thousands upon thousands of college students from all over arrive to talk, get drunk, and stand around. And maybe pass out.

It could be the whole being on your own, independent for the first time thing that fuels this, but it still confuses me. At its highest point, there were probably ten thousand students in a single location, most of them drunk, some of them high (why must spring weekend correspond with 4/20?). Many, many, many people were falling down or passing out. I suppose they still don’t know their limit, which is funny, because they do this every weekend, you think they would have figured it out by now. Despite that, the majority that were still standing were doing so…but nothing else. There is no real reason to go to this place, except to be in the company of others who are just as drunk. There isn’t any music, there isn’t any dancing, there isn’t much of anything except for standing around and drinking and smoking.
I just can’t understand it.

Anywise, there were lots of police and EMTs around to keep things in order and keep people from dying. And I’m usually all for that. This is one time where I can’t say I feel that way. I can’t help but think that all of this takes away from personal responsibility. It isn’t like the EMTs are saving people from a natural disaster, they’re saving them from something they did to themselves. There is something tremendously wrong with this.

I do understand that it isn’t meant to be enjoyable if you’re sober. Don’t bother correcting me on that. Maybe its something I would need to be drunk to understand. But that would bring me down a long road which leads very far away from this train of thought. I’ll touch on that someday though.

Also, a sidenote: as someone who doesn’t drink or smoke, I think events like this are an excellent example of why pot should be legal. The folks who were drunk were vomiting or pissing on themselves or in the woods. The folks who were high were not. Can someone explain to me why one is legal but not the other?

As I walked back to my dorm, I heard a helicopter in the sky above me, and thought that was strange, because usually helicopters don’t pass overhead at one in the morning. So I thought it was likely a news chopper, because it was very likely that the crowd could be seen from very high up. And when I look up, I see the flashing lights of LifeStar, the helicopter that airlifts people to hospitals because they’re so bad off that an ambulance would be too slow. That means someone drank enough so that they were nearly dead, or someone got into a drunken brawl, and was near dead. Either way, this was a situation they voluntarily put themselves in. I have zero pity. None.
However, as much as I’d like to say, “don’t bother keeping EMTs on call, let those students on the ground be an example to others” I know that college students aren’t smart enough to get the message.

How can the sight of ten thousand people having the time of their lives be so depressing?

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

If you’ve watched all three in the series, please let me know what you think.