The extended week

TAing makes me feel like an undergrad again, because the first few days of class means looking up classroom locations and searching for books. Well, there's the addition of booking in hours and room for discussion sections and office hours that's definitely new but, in conclusion: lots of running around and paperwork this week. After the first two days I've reached the conclusion that I seemed to have been going about things backwards.

Take example A, picking up the books: I was emailed by the professor to go to a certain place on Monday to pick up the texts needed for the course. So I went and I did, despite of some minor confusion in which the people thought the books were there and the computer system didn't. A few hours later, I received an email from the system announcing that my books are ready. Shortly after that, another email from the TA coordinator informing us of a new computer system that we need to get through to pick up books.

Or there's example B, booking a room: I needed to book a room before Wednesday, for reasons that don't need to be explored at this juncture. So I did, using the school of med system that I had access to, and then I emailed my room and reserved time to the professor, as she had requested. Shortly after that she asked me to send an email to all the TAs in our course with instructions on how to book a room, since she had no idea how it's done. I did that, explaining I used the school of med system, which didn't require login, so maybe all university affiliates can use it and if that fails, each department also has their own reservation system they can try out. A few hours after that, I got an email from the TA coordinator instructing us how to book rooms. No one cared that I already booked a room or how I did it, which was a relief. I am not inclined to switch over to the other system either, because 1) ALL the bio sci TAs has to go through that system, so time slots are under heavy competition, probably and 2) more paperwork, which I did not need.

At this point I may have said something to Wendy along the lines of, "I think I'm doing everything backwards. Why am I doing everything backwards?"
(Am I strange, sir? A crab, sir?)

We got some classic papers in genetics, which was a definite eye-opener, since these are genetics papers before they had the tools for genetics (think 1940s), which meant that they made a lot of assumptions (that they had no way of testing out the validity of) and math models (which are complicated enough that some took others ten years to solve afterwards). Mike might've liked it. I didn't. I spent a lot of time squinting at various equations and wondering how they got their ratios of Greek letters from the fact that the mean equaled the variance in a Poisson distribution. There must be some derivation involved, right? Right? (If anyone's curious, one of the papers is the famous Luria & Delbruck fluctuation test. Yes, that Luria and that Delbruck.) (Huh, I just found out that it's famous enough that Wikipedia has an entry on it. Without the scary equations, even.)

Someone in my lab got an advertisement from a very well-known chemicals / lab equipment company this week promoting the sale of "lithium salt bugger". I was asked if "bugger" is an actual word and, thinking back to my knowledge of the UK vocabulary (and Mr. Rushton, I might add), I hedged "...not really", and suggested that maybe it's a very grave typo. Upon the blank looks, I explained that it'd make more sense if the ad had read "lithium salt buffer". Then my labmate and I spent some time contemplating whether or not we ought to email back this nice & prestigious company and let them know that they'd been trying to sell "buggers". (There's always the possibility that it's a nod to ENDER'S GAME or something, I suppose. Is there a special anniversary date this week?)

(Beta. It's called a beta.)

Yesterday there was a very angry lady on the bus who called someone who had answered "a Texan" when asked where she'd come from "a disgrace to their heritage" and "stupid, this is why everyone thinks Texas is stupid, because you are". I mean geez, lady, who died? Yes, the effects of the Manifest Destiny wiped out countless Native Americans (she was white, by the way) and that most Americans have some sort of European ancestry, but that is still no reason to explode like that. Careful now, because you come across a bit mad and people might take exception to that, like you did to that poor person on the bus.

I thought I slept until 9am today only to open my eyes and discover it's 7:30am. Such is the effect of getting used to getting up at 6am. I have a four hour TA training session later and stuff I need to do in lab, so this week's not over for me, yet!