one should respond to circumstances in an infinite variety of ways
The best mistakes are those made by someone else - if only one possesses the wit to learn from them. Someone who used to sit opposite me for much of the first two years here has just gone into the dungeons (not really, I just like the dramatic implications of a dungeon) to defend her thesis. I’m pretty confident she’ll pass; even if she isn’t. But the causal chain of events which led upto the thesis defence make for instructive analysis.
Actually, I’m pretty freaked out at some level about all this. It now seems pretty inevitable that I’ll be facing a similar ordeal by hostile assessors at some point in the future - possibly next year. Seeing exactly how freaked out this person is over the whole event is starting to make me feel twitchy. Me no likey twitchy. And I don’t yet know who the hostile external will be… which is bad. I do know who the hostile internal will be … and that’s about ten times worse.
But it’s also quite interesting to realize that I’m resigned to facing the ordeal by assessment - the painstaking paragraph by paragraph dissection of what will constitute three years of work. When I started down this road, I was wondering how on earth I’d finish. People who had finished seemed to be in some far away, remote ivory tower of genius while I plodded on in mediocrity - several thousands of feet below sea level. A couple of years on, I’m still below sea level, but that ivory tower seems closer - and it seems remotely attainable. Not a done deal by any stretch of the imagination. But at least I can see my way clear towards completion now. Something I couldn’t do at the start. Weird. Maybe I’ve just adapted.
Obviously, this means that when the newly passed (Am I jinxing her?) candidate emerges blinking into the daylight at whatever hour, we’ll gather round a bunch of people from the department and proceed to get sloshed at the local. Well, something like that.
On a random and completely unrelated note (I do that a lot, don’t I ?), I think everyone must have gotten that email of fun facts - which includes the salacious tidbit about the length of a pig’s orgasm. Some of you with well meaning friends left unattended near a email client may have gotten it several dozen times over. And then had that email forwarded by yet more well meaning friends. Well, it seems like a stick insect has that record beaten to a pulp. I’m not sure what good that information does the readers of this post - but it’s good to know that there is no point being envious of ham and bacon providers when lowly arthropods er.. perform better.
On 24-Sep-05 at 6:02 am,
elric wrote:
which is why i chose to get assessed on my Masters on course work and exams. the thesis option was just too scary. of course since it was more business-IT orientated than tech, that was a viable option for me.
On 24-Sep-05 at 10:05 am,
Forge wrote:
This is something of a tangent, but that whole email-forward line about “fuck” being an acronym -it shows up on your piggy page above, as well- really gets on my nerves. The last time a cow-orker forwarded that one to me (it was just two weeks ago, in fact) I just had to respond with an explanation, and she’s been all weird ever since.
On 24-Sep-05 at 3:06 pm,
drac wrote:
Elric: I daresay the coursework/exam combo would have been viable option for tech as well - except that I (somewhat naively) didn’t want to tie myself down to a syllabus. I’ve always been more comfortable doing my own thing - for better or for worse - and that’s how all of this started.
Forge: That was possibly the first I had heard that it was supposed a shortened form - it certainly sounded to me like a backronym of sorts.
And do people sending the chain mails ever expect a response in return ? What sort of response would one expect after sending several dozen (sometimes strangers) emails that cinema seats may have used hypodermic needles wedged inside them - or that some random stranger woke up in a bath tub filled with ice and found himself short a pair of kidneys ?
On 24-Sep-05 at 6:45 pm,
Forge wrote:
I’ve found -at least, with people you actually are acquainted with, as opposed to complete strangers- that responses tend to weird out the chain-mailing hordes. I suppose they don’t think of these things are conversations. Presumably, the convenient thing about forwards and chain letters is that you can appear to be saying something (which makes you an interesting person) without actually needing to think of something to say.
And then again; forwarding something can mean anything from “I wholeheartedly believe this and want you to know it” to “I don’t necessarily believe this, or am not interested in finding out for sure either way, but I think it’s funny/thought-provoking/entertaining/whatever.” I think the weird-out value of a serious response is higher when it’s the latter case, because a serious response is automatically asuming the former. You, the forwarder, have suddenly become the holder of a position which you must now either defend or never mention again. Hopefully. And now I’m thinking about this way too much.