Strongly Worded

I + E = Intensity and Excitement

So a big huge work project (two 7-day training events) is consuming my emotional/intellectual energy. I spend most of every day either working on said project; worrying about said project; or having long, boring dreams about it.

I refuse to refer to the project or the upcoming weeks as "hellish", "nightmarish" or "insane". Instead, I'm referring to the immediate future as "a time of intensity and excitement".

I will not bore you with the level of complexity associated with this "challenging"project. There are two tidbits that really capture it all.

Behold:

1) Remember how I'm working with scientists in my job? Well, the scientists have all kinds of interesting ways of giving directions. Instead of saying "make enough packets for 13 groups of ten students, plus copies for their 13 T.A.s and a few extras", the professors direct poor my poor humanities-educated self as follows: "Make 13S + 13T + E packets, whereas S = number of students, T = Teaching Assistants, and E = extras."

2) There's an exercise in which pairs of students have to have a conversation, and then switch
partners seven times. To my knowledge, normal people in the normal world would organize this as follows: "Students, pick a random person and pair up with him/her. Now pair up with another person you haven't spoken with." [repeat five more times].

But here: this would be way too simple. And thus the lovely faculty have devised an algorithm to randomly pair up 122 students in seven different (and completely random) permutations.

Which is all to explain why my posting's been a little sparse of late, and may continue to be so for the next week or two.

Posted by Dori at 10:03 PM