Gabrielle's Friendship Day: technology

Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts

The ghost in the exam

Consider looking at the problem!

Millions of people cheerfully and indiscreetly post details of their personal lives on the Internet, forgetting that Internet posts have a kind of digital immortality. Thanks to archiving and caching systems, erasing a post doesn't necessarily make it go away.

It's also true of education websites, such as the one where I have occasionally posted exam keys for the benefit of my students. One diligent young fellow nosed about through the Intertubes till he dredged up a cache of some of my old posts, although they had been deleted from the original website. Eureka!

He took careful note of his discovery. In fact, the evidence suggests he memorized some of the indicated results. He must have been quite proud of his achievement when he encountered and quickly recognized the following graph on his math exam:

It looked so familiar! When the accompanying problem asked him for the values of f(−5) and f(3), he promptly and confidently wrote down 5 and 7. Amazing! And both wrong!

I tend to rewrite—or at least tweak—my exams. He didn't notice that I had changed the figure from the one he had seen:

Yeah, that was the one where f(−5) = 5 and f(3)= 7. His on-line explorations had led him astray.

He really should have spent the time studying instead.

A date with Microsoft

which will live in infamy

Is Bill Gates to blame? I don't know. But the heavy hand of Microsoft Word continues to plague me.

My office computer was recently upgraded (good!), which means I have a system which has reverted to all of Microsoft's defaults (bad!). I had subdued Word 2003 to my grudging satisfaction, but my new copy of Word 2007 has all of the bad habits back in force. The examples are many.

For instance, someone at Microsoft decided that its users really need the copyright symbol more often than they need to enclose the letter “c” in parentheses. Thus any attempt to write “(c)” instantly auto-corrects to “©”—a symbol I need approximately never. I am much more likely to (a) type in a list of items, (b) avoid Microsoft's intrusively clumsy outlining function, and (c) get a copyright symbol when I least want it. Naturally, I go into the auto-correct defaults and rip out the preset substitution for “(c).”

Even worse, though, in my estimation, is Microsoft's insistence on foisting superscripted ordinals on the world (which appears to have happily embraced them). Word won't let you write “1st” without turning it into “1^st.” Ick. Whose bright idea was that?

The Associated Press Style Guide offers straightforward advice about dates: “Always use Arabic figures, without st, nd, rd or th.” Sounds good to me. Those are understood, aren't they? After all, when we look at a date like December 25, do you say “December twenty-five” or “December twenty-fifth”? I think most of us provide the ordinals automatically.

Unfortunately, my more literal-minded colleagues insist on the ordinal endings and—thanks to the default use of Word as their Outlook text editor—I get lots of e-mail sprinkled with dates written in superscripted ordinal form. Oh, good. Then, as is often the case, if formatting is lost in bouncing the message through various e-mail clients and servers, you get default plain-text messages with extra lines embedded to accommodate the ordinal superscripts. And for what? To accommodate an unnecessary formatting flourish, courtesy of someone's decision up in Redmond.

I can't be too harsh on geeks and nerds because that would be to accuse myself, but we do have some excessively soft spots for pointless gimmicks. When I first began to receive letters printed on monospaced dot-matrix printers with right-justified margins, I considered it to be a sign of the Apocalypse. Are you old enough to remember those? The only way to right-justify a monospaced text is to pad the lines with whole spaces to make the right margin come out even. Weird rivers of white space ran through the text as these interpolations were made. People were doing it simply because they could, ignoring the fact that such text was ugly and more difficult to read than ragged-right documents.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Speaking of things I can do ... a few more forays into Word's default settings and I will have ripped the guts out of the stylistic peculiarities that drive me nuts. When it comes to breaking in a new copy of Word, that's always one of the things I do 1st.

Can you hear me now, God?

New vistas in god-bothering

Are you looking for a new angle on your prayer life? A young man in California has a suggestion and is hoping you might pitch him a few bucks in return. He's devised an iPhone application for petitioning God and is awaiting Apple's approval to sell it via the computer company's apps store.

Here are some excerpts from a news article in the Sacramento Bee:

Fair Oaks teen devises prayer app for iPhone

By Hudson Sangree
Published Tuesday, Jul. 21, 2009

For eons, people have reached out to the Almighty with prayers and supplications. Soon they might be able to use their iPhones.

Fair Oaks teenager Allen Wright thought up an application for the Apple iPhone called “A Note to God.”

It lets iPhone users send prayers into cyberspace and allows them to read the prayers of others. The messages are stored in a database, and users remain anonymous.

If you're anonymous, how will you get credit from God for your prayer? (That omniscience thing is going to have to kick in.)

Wright, 17, submitted his proposal to Medl Mobile, a Los Angeles startup that is developing apps for Apple to sell on its Web site. It selected “A Note to God” from 20,000 proposals.

“It's so simple, it's brilliant,” said Andrew Maltin, one of the co-founders of Medl Mobile. “We think it's going to be extremely successful.”

Wright, a junior at Del Campo High School and regular churchgoer, said he came up with the idea while lying in bed and feeling lonesome.

“If you want to send a message, and you don't have anybody to talk to, you could send a little prayer,” he said.

Don't have anybody to talk to? I thought you could talk to God at any time. Perhaps not. But at least we can be sure that God is eagerly waiting by his iPhone.

Successful apps can generate thousands or even millions of dollars for developers. Any proceeds from “A Note to God” would be split between Apple, Medl and Wright.

If his app becomes a big seller, Wright said he'd like to use his share of the profits to go to college.

This actually sounds like it might be more effective than praying for a scholarship.

The application is not a joke, but a sincere way for people to reach out to the divine and to each other, [Maltin] said.

Users can read each others' prayers and be supportive by clicking on a “thumbs up” sign, he said. Otherwise, they can't leave feedback or respond, he said.

Responding, after all, is God's job.

Religious scholars contacted by The Bee on Monday welcomed the concept, although one offered a note of caution.

The Rev. James Murphy, vicar general of the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento, agreed the iPhone app “could be a high-tech form of prayer and an authentic way to express our desires to God.”

“There is in each one of us the need to communicate with the divine and to reach the transcendent," he said.

But he cautioned would-be users to question their motivations.

“Prayer is direct to God, and God should be the primary motive,” he said. “If the motive is to be seen by others, be careful. There's a sense in which prayer is private.”

He said whatever the form, prayers are heard. “God will hear it," he said. “You don't have to have his e-mail address.”

One must give Father Murphy credit for cheekiness. The Catholic Church is often criticized by non-Catholic Christians for encouraging the practice of praying to the saints in heaven, choosing to invoke intermediaries instead of praying directly to God (or Jesus—one of God's more popular avatars). But here we have Father Murphy warning people that prayer is direct to God and that they should be careful about broadcasting their pleas to the deity. (Sorry, Virgin Mother, I forgot we were on a conference call. Would you mind hanging up so that Jesus and I can chat in private?)

Darleen Pryds, an expert in medieval religious practices at the Franciscan School of Theology—part of the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley—called the app “a brilliant use of technology” that brings to mind the 13th-century bells summoning people to pray.

“This application sounds to me like a call to prayer,” she said. “It creates a community of prayer, and by seeing other people's prayers, it is a reminder to pray yourself.”

Or a muezzin's call to prayer from a minaret!

Wright, a lanky fair-haired teen, said he prays regularly and attends the New Life Community Church in Fair Oaks.

His favorite iPhone app is one that calls up quotes from Scripture.

In his suburban home on a quiet cul-de-sac, Wright demonstrated the working model of “A Note to God” on his iPhone.

He said the need to write a message focuses his prayer. The messages can be as long as you want, he said.

No limit on length? Excellent! I presume one could copy and paste 53 copies of the “Hail Mary” and get credit for a rosary, right? (Oops! That's my Catholic roots showing. The BVM just muscled back in.)

Allen's father, Tod Wright, is pretty certain his son has latched onto something good.

The 44-year-old Wright said people need a way to reach out when they are grappling with heartache, trouble and tragedy. His son's app might provide an outlet for their prayers.

“It's going to do something for a lot of people to help them through," he said. “Having a place you can send a message to your lost and loved ones—people you believe are your guardian angels.”

“All of us could use some place to reach out,” he said. “I think Allen's is perfect.”

Up next: A Tibetan prayer-wheel as an automated iPhone app. It'll pray even when you're too busy!

Amen. I'm hanging up now.

The Norwegian blue diskette

This is ex-data

“I knew he was trouble the moment I saw him walk in. It's a kind of sixth sense that you develop when you're in tech support.”

Lawrence and I were sitting in a Sacramento restaurant to fuel up the hour before a computer club meeting. I was a mini-bureaucrat in one of the state's mini-bureaucracies and Lawrence worked for a university. It was 1986 and we had converged on the capital city from different directions for some user group fun. A motley crew of regulars and semi-regulars would convene each month for burgers and sandwiches before taking in the featured speaker of the month and playing the usual “can-you-top-this?” game during the Q&A. Tale-swapping before the meetings was another regular feature and Lawrence had the floor.

I was not immediately impressed with Lawrence's story. Wasn't nearly everyone who walked into a tech-support office an occasion of trouble?

“But you must be used to that, Lawrence.” I said. “Don't you get weird problems all the time when you work tech support? And it must be even worse doing tech support at a university. Lots more opportunity for wacky cock-ups by clever people doing stupid things.”

Lawrence grimaced.

“Well, yeah,” he admitted. “That was certainly the case with this guy. He was a teaching assistant in the economics department and he had a data problem.”

A diskette problem, to be specific. In the high-spirited early days of personal computing, the Apple II and the IBM PC had established the 5¼-inch floppy diskette as the standard digital medium. By the time of Lawrence's incident, the newer 3½-inch was catching on, popularized by the Macintosh and newer model PCs. That's what the hapless grad student had in his hand when he visited the tech-support office.

“Here,” he told Lawrence, handing him the diskette. “I need you to recover the data from this PC disk.”

Lawrence took the diskette and looked it over. There was no obvious damage to it. He carried it over to a desktop computer that sported an array of different disk drives, inserted it into a 3½-inch drive and typed a command to list the disk's directory.

Error message.

That was only to be expected. Lawrence ran Norton Utilities on it. He tried to scan the diskette's sectors for recoverable data. After several minutes with several different diagnostic software tools, Lawrence ejected the diskette and handed it back to the teaching assistant.

“This,” he declared, “is a dead diskette. The directory is nonexistent and the bytes on it are indistinguishable from gibberish. Sorry. I couldn't recover anything at all. That happens sometimes when a disk really gets scrambled.”

The grad student was aghast.

“You don't understand,” the TA said. “You have to fix the disk. It has the gradebook for Economics 101 on it. I need the grades for the professor.”

“Sorry, but perhaps you don't understand,” rejoined Lawrence. “The data has passed on. It is no more. I can't recover what's not there. You are simply going to have to dig up your backup copy.”

A moment of silence became uncomfortably prolonged. Finally the student spoke.

“Um. This is the only copy.”

Lawrence gave him a weary look.

“Okay. Then you have no digital copy. You're going to have to re-enter all the scores from the last time you printed them out and recreate the gradebook from scratch.”

Now the grad student looked completely devastated.

“But there is no print-out! I was using the disk to prepare a grade list to post in the classroom before finals. The professor wanted to let students know their current grades going into finals week. That's when the disk crashed and I got a read-error from the computer. We didn't put up any previous grade reports. There's no other disk and there's no print-out. That's why you have to fix this disk. You just have to!”

Lawrence regarded the graduate student assistant with long-suffering patience.

“This is tech support. We do technical work. We don't perform miracles. I can't recover what no longer exists.”

The TA left Lawrence's office with his head bowed and shoulders slumped, the useless diskette clutched in one hand. A moment later he heard the sudden sound of the diskette's plastic case shattering against the concrete wall of the corridor and the slam of the door behind the departing TA.

“Rather dramatic,” I said to Lawrence as he finished his story. Other people at the table were grinning at its conclusion.

“Shortly thereafter I got a call from the Econ 101 professor complaining that I had failed to help his TA. I had to explain all over to him that you can't get data from a scrambled diskette. He was particularly upset because there was only one week left in the quarter and all the scores from the previous eight or nine weeks had been on the diskette.”

“So what did they do for grades?”

“That I don't know. No one told me. It I were to guess, though, I'd bet there were a lot of students who got surprisingly good grades in that section of Econ 101.”

I thought about it a second.

“Yeah, I wouldn't take that bet. I think you're right. It was the professor's safest option. Generous grades would prevent any student from filing a complaint and causing the department chair to adjudicate the dispute and ask for the grade records. We could have a bunch of econ students out there who got passing grades they never earned.”

And later they all went to work in the financial sector.

Looking at you, kid

Arrgh! I'll keep an eye on it!

My father's right eye is somewhere in a University of California medical lab. It came into their possession after a surgeon extracted the blind orb and set Dad up for a glass replacement. He's been a one-eyed man for several years now, though he has yet to find the land of the blind in which he could be king.

Did the UC med school find anything interesting in my father's eye? I'm more than merely curious these days, especially since last year, when my ophthalmologist told me that the retina of my left eye was scarred. (Dad's right eye. My left eye. We're as opposite as can be.) The eye doctor opined that the likeliest cause of the scarring was a leaking blood vessel, but there was no indication of leakage into the vitreous and I could not report any significant incidents that would have confirmed such an episode.

My ophthalmologist decided that no immediate intervention was indicated, but that we should “keep an eye on it.” I dutifully laughed at what I assumed was an eye doctor's favorite joke, but her advice seemed reasonable enough. She referred me to a retinal specialist for a second opinion, who quickly concurred with my ophthalmologist's recommendation:

“I think she's right. No intervention is indicated. We could zap it with a laser, of course, but the potential risk outweighs the likely benefit at this point. You should let us know immediately, of course, if there are any significant changes in your vision, but otherwise it should suffice to check your condition every six months or so.”

I was perfectly happy to accept the opinion of the two ophthalmologists that it was not necessary to shoot a laser beam into my eye. The semi-annual checkups seemed quite adequate, thank you very much.

Six months ago, the checkup proceeded without incident. This month, however, there was some additional excitement. The ophthalmologist ushered me into an examining room that sported an imposing piece of electronic scanning gear.

“It's brand new,” she told me. “We can now do better and more detailed scans than ever before.”

I sat down in front of it with my blearily dilated eyes and followed her directions to stare into the bright lights. A few seconds later, the color inkjet printer attached to the equipment spit out a detailed scan of my left retina.

“See that?” the ophthalmologists asked me chirpily, obviously still enjoying the novelty of her new diagnostic gear. “It shows you as clear as could be that you have an accumulation of fluid behind your retina. I'm going to refer you to the retinal consultant again and you can show him this printout.”

I was not as bubbly about the bubble as she was—in fact I was unnerved—but I dutifully agreed to see the retinal specialist the next week. In the meantime, I noticed that the scan was labeled with xy coordinates to identify the location of the cross-sections: 272 for the x coordinate on one graph, 8 for the y coordinate on the other. That, of course, captured my attention.

On the day of my appointment with the consultant, I put a brave face on things and shared the eye scan with my calculus class. The students were duly impressed (or at least were kind enough to pretend to be) by this example of xy coordinates at use in the real world. They passed the scan around and commiserated with me. One of them asked what was going to be done.

“Oh, I'm just going in for a consultation and second opinion. No one has decided yet to shoot a laser into my eye,” I finished, a bit weakly. The students favored me with sickly smiles.

I reported to the retinal specialist's office and endured the customary two-hour wait till it was my turn to see the man himself. I gave him the printout from my ophthalmologist.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, yes. That's quite a bit better.”

The bubble is a good thing?

“Huh?” I said, articulately.

“The fluid pocket is shrinking,“ the doctor replied. “That means we made the right decision in not intervening. Your problem is taking care of itself.”

“Um,” I said, suavely. “The bubble was already there last time?”

The consulting ophthalmologist seemed just a bit puzzled. “Hmm? Oh, yes. But this time your eye doctor was able to give me her own scan. Last time you were here I had to do it myself.”

And somehow managed not to mention it to me.

“This fluid pocket is definitely smaller than the one we saw a year ago,” he concluded.

“Oh,” I said, brightly. “That's good news.”

“Yes,” agreed the doctor. “Just see your regular eye doctor in another six months and we'll continue to watch your progress.”

The bubble was not new. The bubble had been there a year ago. The bubble was smaller now. I was happy. Sort of. I was also muttering a bit to myself as I left the consultant's office and walked out into the overcast afternoon. To my dilated pupils the sky was as bright as a laser blast, but I put on my Joe Cool sunglasses and headed home.

It was a good day, I told myself, so stop grousing.

By the way, after I showed my calculus students the scan of my eye and the utility of xy coordinate systems in medicine, I returned to the math offices and found one of my colleagues at his desk, his office door left incautiously open. I could not resist sharing with him an account of what I had just done. He perused the eye scan judiciously, his lips pursed and his head slowly nodding.

“That's very interesting,” he said. “Nice job. I'm sure your students were impressed.” He paused for a beat, then looked up at me. “I think I have some good news for you,” he continued. “My wife volunteers some time each week at a local animal shelter. When you start wearing an eyepatch, she should be able to get you a parrot to wear on your shoulder.”

Your calculator passed the exam!

Too bad you didn't

It may not arise too often in practice, but suppose you want to find the derivative of z = y²e^4x with respect to s, where x = 2s − 3t and y = 7s − t². It's a perfectly good problem for testing the differentiation skills of one's calculus students and their understanding of the chain rules for partial derivatives. As is often the case, there is a good way and a bad way to work out the correct answer. The bad way involves brute force substitution, replacing each occurrence of x and y and then differentiating with respect to s. Even in a problem as elementary as this one, finding ∂z/∂s by substitution and differentiation adds additional steps (like the product rule, for example). It is a daunting task to tackle the direct differentiation of z = (7s − t²)² exp(4(2s − 3t)).

This could be avoided with a little thought, which reminds the attentive student about the chain rule. The individual derivatives in the chain rule formula are relatively easy to compute: ∂z/∂s = (∂z/∂x)(∂x/(∂s) + (∂z/∂y)(∂y/∂s). Most of my students remembered this rule and applied themselves to the necessary calculations. With a little care, one can obtain the correct answer in a few steps.

One of my students, however, decided to obtain the answer in one step. He typed the problem into his calculator, entering the slightly grotesque version that results from substituting for x and y in terms of s and t. He could never have been expected to compute the result successfully in the time available, but his TI-89 quickly spat out an answer that he merely transcribed on his paper.

He had done this before. He had merely written down some calculator results and I had given him only a handful of points for setting up the problems—but none for the answers. But now he was doing it again. Had he not learned his lesson? Perhaps he had learned a lesson other than the one I intended: He could either skip the problem because he could not do it, or he could give it to his calculator and hope to get a few points for the setup. Good thinking!

Too bad the points derived in that manner aren't enough to produce a passing grade.

I've long been concerned about the phenomenon of calculator dependency. I've seen its impact at all levels of mathematical instruction, but the example from my multivariate calculus class is particularly disturbing. The student who can't live without his TI-89 has somehow survived till calculus III. He doesn't know how to apply the basic rules of differentiation. How did he earn passing grades in I and II? Maybe we should give a math degree to his calculator.

But not to him.

Thinking outside the cell

Yin meets yang

He wasn't one of my students, but he knew who I was.

“Hey, Mr. Z, you're a computer guy, right?”

Well, kind of. At least, I was on the college's information technology committee. It was 1990 or so and computers were increasingly percolating into the campus.

“Yeah, I guess so. What can I do for you?”

“I have a problem with my computer and maybe you can help me. Do you use a Mac or a PC?”

“PC.”

“Damn. Okay, sorry to bother you.”

As anyone knows, of course, personal computing is divided between the two great religious sects: Apple and Windows. Or Hatfields and McCoys. Montagues and Capulets? It's difficult sometimes for me to remember, partly because I don't have much patience with sectarian wars or family feuds. The gap cannot be bridged.

“No, no,” I said. “Go ahead and tell me your problem anyway. Who knows? Maybe I can help you.”

He was using the Wingz spreadsheet program on his Macintosh. Although largely forgotten now, Wingz was a powerful spreadsheet from Informix that eventually lost out to Microsoft's Excel (as did all of the other spreadsheets in the world).

“I have a six-page spreadsheet in Wingz but it won't print except for the first page. I've tried printing the whole thing and get only page one. I've tried printing just page two and nothing comes out.”

“Can you edit pages other than the first?”

“No problem. I can change stuff and save the changes, but nothing I do prints out anything except the first page. I used to be able to print it all, but something happened and I'm really stuck now.”

He had saved and reloaded the file. He had rebooted the system. He had done all of the usual jiggery-pokery to get things going again, but he was still stuck.

“Does Wingz have import/export options?” I asked.

“Yeah. Definitely.”

“Good. Can you save your spreadsheet as a Lotus 1-2-3 file?”

“I think so. Yeah, I'm pretty sure.”

“Okay. Save your file as a Lotus 1-2-3 file using the export feature. Then use the import feature to bring it back in. See if the conversion process clears up the printing problem you're having.”

He seemed just a little skeptical, but he said he'd try my idea.

A day later the student caught up with me again in front of the math department building.

“Hey, Mr. Z! It worked!”

“Great! Thanks for letting me know how it turned out. I guess some gimmicks work across platforms, eh?”

Knowledge. More portable than you might think.

Computers. Weird and demon-possessed no matter what the logo.

Psychic warfare with my boss

The workplace wizard strikes!

I became a bureaucrat in the early eighties. It was a detour on my journey to the classroom that lasted half a dozen years. Despite my initial trepidation, I found my time in the California civil service surprisingly enjoyable and worthwhile. It probably helped that I was in a small state agency that worked closely with legislation and legislators. As a former legislative aide, I had skills that were appreciated by my coworkers. Since the agency had only a handful of employees, we were often called upon to be flexible in the tasks we performed and to do a variety of different things. In addition to being the in-house expert on legislation, I was also the resident computer guru at a time when desktop computers were a new presence in state offices.

Civil servants can, of course, stay in one office or agency for an entire career, from the day they sign on to the day they retire. We can be remarkably stable. Our bosses, however, are remarkably temporary. I had three bosses in my six years.

It's the nature of the beast. State service is a layer cake, founded on a broad base of essentially permanent employees. The topmost levels are the at-will employees of California's elected constitutional officers, the executive branch leaders that include the governor, attorney general, treasurer, controller, secretary of state, etc. These elected men and women get to choose their own aides and lieutenants, assigning them and dismissing them as they please. Civil service protection is for the lower levels of the layer cake, not for the icing on top.

My first two bosses were admirably suited to their positions, but each one moved on to greater challenges just when I was getting used to them. The third one was a rather different case. The arrival of “Laura” was due to a bad bit of timing. The top position in our agency came open just when it became necessary to move Laura from the office in which she had worn out her welcome. She was a victim of her own success, a legislative secretary who had inveigled her legislator into marrying her. This may have been a faux pas. While it's permissible for a legislator to carry on a passionate affair with an employee, a legislator cannot have a spouse on the office payroll. Laura's career was truncated the moment she said “I do.” She had to get out of the legislator's office, preferably out of the State Capitol entirely.

That started Laura's years of wandering in the desert. Her new husband called in some political debts and incurred a few more to get Laura some top-level appointments that were exempt from civil service requirements. These positions paid more, but were correspondingly more precarious. Laura had been an effective and skilled legislative secretary; she was a frustrated figurehead in her series of temporary appointments. Her reputation preceded her and we had no great expectations when she moved into the executive secretary's office.

We were pleasantly surprised to discover that we were in for a honeymoon period. During her first months as our executive officer, Laura seemed content to let us do our work. We'd brief her before our agency's routine meetings and give her draft remarks with which to address the legislators and constitutional officers who attended our hearings. It worked well until Laura became restive and decided she wanted to exercise her authority. She felt that the office staff was too independent, having been selected in advance of her arrival and feeling no personal loyalty toward her. Laura looked around for an opportunity to replace one of us with a more biddable individual.

I'm sure I was considered for the chopping block, but Laura eventually decided on a different victim. She drew a bead on Mary Lou, our staff services analyst. Mary Lou was the lowest ranking member of the office staff and thus the most vulnerable to the boss's wrath. My personal perspective was distorted, because I viewed Mary Lou as the office goddess of information. Although I had been appointed to a higher-level position by virtue of my graduate degree, I was the new kid on the block. By contrast, Mary Lou had already racked up years of service and knew everything one needed to know about getting things done in a state agency. Sometimes I thought she had memorized the enormous State Administrative Manual. No one needed to page through SAM; we could just ask Mary Lou.

Even a low-ranking civil servant like a staff services analyst is protected by civil service rules against capricious dismissal. It would be necessary for Laura to “build a file” against Mary Lou. Given that Mary Lou was an experienced and competent worker, Laura would have to resort to various tricks to make her look bad. At last our boss would be able to draw on the game-playing skills she had perfected at the State Capitol.

Having recruited the office secretary to her cause with promises of preferment and promotion, the executive secretary began her campaign of entrapment. Laura would dictate to the secretary a directive for Mary Lou, which the secretary would type into Microsoft Word and print out on the laser printer for Laura's signature. Instead of then delivering the directive to Mary Lou, however, the secretary was under Laura's orders to hold the directive till Mary Lou left for her lunch break. The plan was simple. The moment Mary Lou left the office, the secretary would place the boss's directive on Mary Lou's desk. When our staff services analyst returned to her office she'd find that the boss had assigned her a task and given her a minimal amount of time to accomplish it.

There are few secrets in a small agency. We knew right away what Laura was up to. Mary Lou showed me some of the snap assignments that she had barely accomplished before the boss marched into her office to demand the results. She was sure that Laura's campaign would eventually produce incidents where Laura could file reports of unsatisfactory performance in Mary Lou's personnel file. Eventually Mary Lou would be subject to discipline or reassignment—or would flee in self-preservation. What to do?

Digital dueling

I modified my office routine a bit. First thing each morning, having arrived after my pass through the State Capitol to collect the day's legislative records, I'd log on to the office computer system from the back office. We had a primitive network linking some IBM desktops. Security was virtually nonexistent on the shared hard disk. We used the same directories and swapped files among the various workstations. I became extremely interested in checking each morning with a global directory listing sorted by date. Then I'd peruse all the files that had been altered (or created) in the last 24 hours, with particular attention paid to the Word files. I generally refrained from printing out any incriminating evidence, but I read certain files carefully.

Then I'd repair to Mary Lou's office. She was sure to be in, well before the boss had bothered to arrive. I'd check that the office secretary was not hovering near and then make my report:

“Vasconcellos. Assembly Constitutional Amendment 69. Latest version of bill and latest analysis of fiscal impact by the Legislative Analyst's Office.”

Mary Lou would listen carefully, smile, and make a few discreet shorthand marks on her notepad. She could now plan her day to ensure she had the necessary components assembled by noon to answer Laura's next challenge. When she returned from lunch, there was the imperative memo from the boss demanding that Mary Lou drop everything to get the latest version of ACA 69 and its current LAO analysis.

Laura marched into Mary Lou's office at 1:30 and demanded to know whether Mary Lou had discharged her latest assignment. Mary Lou calmly handed the boss a neatly paper-clipped sheaf of papers, ACA 69 with its analysis and a cover memo by Mary Lou noting that the measure had not been amended since the previous month. Laura accepted the packet with a frown on her face, turned on her heel, and marched back out.

The ACA 69 incident is real, one among several similar incidents in which Mary Lou suddenly became capable of instantaneous prodigies. It sticks in my mind because it was an especially delicious coup. Mary Lou didn't even need to run any errands to get the necessary materials because I already had them in my legislative files. What's more, I ambushed Laura myself later that afternoon, my own ACA 69 file in hand, sweetly inquiring whether Mary Lou had provided her with everything she needed. Laura fixed her irritable gaze on me and, as if to defend the task she had assigned to Mary Lou, said, “Yes, yes. It was quite useful. I learned a lot about the current version of Vasco's proposed amendment.”

My smile didn't waver as I flourished my file. “Oh, good,” I said, “although it's a bit of a surprise. You see, we've had that analysis in our files since last month. See? Your initials are on my copy of it, indicating that you've already read it. But never mind. I suppose it's a good thing that Mary Lou provided you with a refresher.”

Laura favored me with a sickly smile, ducked her head, and retreated into her private office.

Insubordination

The work of our agency had a natural ebb and flow in synchronization with legislative sessions. When the legislators had fled Sacramento, we had a chance to catch our breath. While I was sometimes chained to my desk on weekends when the legislature was in full swing, during recesses I could attend to the occasional outside project or actually consider getting a life. During the slack periods, I would sometimes tell my immediate supervisor Bill (not Laura) that I would draw a couple of days' worth of comp time from my heap of accrued weekend hours and be at home editing manuscript or writing. Bill would cheerfully wave me off and I'd vanish for those days. After all, I always treated the office to lunch when my royalty checks came in. It was a win-win situation.

On one of those occasions the legislature was not entirely inert. I needed to dip into my comp time to catch up on neglected projects, but the legislature couldn't be ignored. No major hearings were scheduled, but amendments might be filed and new analyses might appear. Not to worry: I'd enlist Mary Lou, who by now had jumped through enough of Laura's hoops to be especially familiar with legislative amendments and analyses. I turned the legislative portfolio over to her for safekeeping and told her to ring me up at home if any complications arose. The boss, of course, made sure that they did.

Mary Lou phoned me: “Laura has called a meeting for tomorrow.”

“Really? Whatever for?”

“She didn't say, but I think you're in trouble for not being in the office.”

“Why is that? I cleared it with Bill before I took off.”

“I think that she thinks you should have checked with her first.”

“It's a perfect lose-lose situation, because then she'd complain that I'm not respecting the chain of command by bothering her over something Bill should handle. Or, worse, she'd say ‘no way’ and I'd be stuck at the office twiddling my thumbs.”

“There could be something else that set her off. She rummaged through my desk again when I was out.”

“Do tell! You think she saw it?”

“Oh, yes. Her face has been flushed all day. I'm sure she slipped into my office when I was out on an errand. She's been so distracted she hasn't even tried to ambush me. I'm sure she blames you.”

At last the boss got one right. I had given Mary Lou a copy of How to Work for a Jerk and suggested she leave it in her desk rather than take it home. I knew that the boss would eventually find it during one of her snoop sessions. Apparently she had.

The next morning the office secretary waved me over as I walked in. Although she was the boss's dutiful henchwoman, she was concerned that I had wandered into the bull's eye intended for Mary Lou alone.

“You need to be more careful. Laura is really pissed at you. She says you're insubordinate!”

“Really? Let's see.” I flipped open the dictionary on the secretary's desk. “Insubordinate, insubordinate. Ah, here it is. ‘In-sub-or-di-nate. Not submissive to authority.’ Well, damn if she isn't right. Don't worry. I can't imagine she'll make a habit of that.”

I left the secretary with her mouth gaping open. Mary Lou caught up with me outside my office.

“She's already in. We're supposed to see her at nine. It's just you and me and it looks like you're the one in hot water. It may be up over your head.”

“I've been in hot water so long it feels normal. And if it's already over my head, what's a few feet more? I'm not going to worry about it.”

Mary Lou did not seem particularly comforted by my air of insouciance. At nine o' clock I collected Mary Lou from her office and we strolled into Laura's inner sanctum. We sat down in the two chairs in front of her desk. Laura wasted no time in giving me a warning shot across my bow.

“It was very nice of you to come into the office today, Zeno.”

“No problem. Mary Lou said you were calling a meeting for this morning, so of course I'm here.”

“You left the legislative portfolio with Mary Lou while you were absent.”

I liked the word “absent,” as if I had been naughtily playing hooky and liked to shirk my responsibilities. A proper response would have been, “Listen, you trumped-up whore, I was here every day, all day, for the three-day Memorial Day weekend. I didn't see your fat ass in here then!” That, however, would have been intemperate and completely uncharacteristic of me. Instead I said:

“Yes, I did. Mary Lou knew that she could call me if anything came up, but she was able to handle it on her own.”

Laura stuck the needle in: “Yes, Mary Lou did a very good job of taking care of your legislative portfolio while you were gone.”

I smiled broadly at the boss and flipped open my steno pad. It normally sat on my desk next to my phone and served as a log of my calls and conversations, but I also carried it into staff meetings and the like. Laura's face froze into a mask of confusion as I grinned, pulled a pen from my pocket, and began scribbling on my pad. The smile was still on my face when I glanced back up at the boss and tilted the pad toward Mary Lou so she could see what I had written:

Laura: Mary Lou did a v. good job taking care of my legislative portfolio while I was taking time off.

In a beautiful and almost perfect synchronization, the corners of Mary Lou's lips curved upward while Laura's unfroze and curved downward. Both women knew exactly what had occurred.

The boss had just given Mary Lou a strongly positive evaluation in the presence of two witnesses, one of whom had just made a contemporaneous written record of it. My notes would be an extremely awkward counterweight to her efforts to build a file against Mary Lou—clear, explicit praise of a supposedly incompetent staffer.

“Okay, we're done!” snapped Laura.

Mary Lou and I left Laura's office and I closed the door behind us.

“I can't believe you got away with that!” exclaimed Mary Lou.

“Got away with what, Mary Lou? The boss called a meeting. I showed up in time. She said things. I took notes. What's the big deal?”

The great escape

Laura was sacked after only two years as our agency's chief executive. But I was gone before she was. Some of my days off had been strategically chosen to allow me to travel to job interviews at various California colleges. I finally got a nibble. The job offer was not ideal. The appointment was limited term, not tenure track. However, I was ready to take the risk, hoping that it would help to be on the spot when a future tenure-track position opened up. And that is indeed how it worked out. Laura had motivated me to go do what I really wanted to do.

I owe her so much!

Finger exercises

Several easy pieces

They call it keyboarding these days, but when I was in high school in the sixties the name of the course was typing. Despite being a college prep student, I took a full year of typing, sitting among the future stenographers of America. I knew it would be useful during my future career as a writer.

I was wrong about the career. There were periods of professional writing, such as my brief stint as a journalist and a few magazine pieces, but my livelihood comes from the classroom. Nevertheless, keyboards are a big part of my life and it helps that I can rattle off text with aplomb, speed, and accuracy. It was a big advantage when I returned to grad school for a math education degree.

Last month I was reminded about my weeks in typing class when I started digging through one of the archive boxes evicted from my parents' basement. Mom wanted to reclaim some space, which entailed certain adult children taking responsibility for material left behind. I started sorting through the box's contents and found myself looking at ancient documents from high school. The forty-year-old papers included some sheets from my typing class. Doodling!

Did you know you could doodle on a typewriter? I was already a self-taught typist when I began the typing class and picked up speed rapidly. My instructor didn't care if I finished the in-class assignments early as long as I did not distract my slower neighbors. Therefore I often banged out random short stories. (My preferred genres were science fiction and mystery.)

I also, however, tried my hand at some typographical humor. The source of my inspiration is unknown. Perhaps I had seen previous examples, but I don't recall any. All I have is the silent testimony of two pages of typewriter doodles. The players are characters from the keyboard and their dialog floats above their heads. Here's an example:

How did he lose his leg? / Y X X

I seemed unduly fond of amputation humor. Perhaps it just suits the medium:

Victor, you don't have a leg to stand on. / V Y They had to amputate his foot. / E E F

How delightful. The surgical vein continues.

I happen to know that it's silicone. / p p P And the Queen said, "Off with his head!" / 8 8 o Oscar, I don't think that Clyde is all there. / O O C

Of course, I was in high school. The local scene must have inspired this one:

Shocking! And in public, too! / I I X I I I I

It's tricky trying to replicate some of these typewriter gags on a computer. For example, here's a joke that depends on an overstrike, which is easy on a typewriter. Not so easy with a word processor or on a blog. The image is a scan of the original document:

Good typewriters also offered half-line spacing for convenience in creating superscripts and subscripts. I'm sure I used half-line spacing to place the feathers (apostrophes) close to the horizon (underline characters):

Just think. Had my mother simply trashed the contents of her overstuffed basement, these gems would have been lost to history. What a precious gift they are to us today, four decades later!

Messages from beyond

Cashing in on End Times

You've undoubtedly already seen the bumper stickers announcing that irresponsible Christians are ready to abandon their vehicles at a moment's notice, putting the rest of the population at risk. And, of course, there's the stacks of books from the Left Behind series that used to clutter bookstores and now litter the ten-cent table at library sales. (The movie version features Kirk Cameron!) Cashing in on the apocalypse is big business.

Somehow, however, I missed the news item earlier this year that we can now leave messages to our earthbound family and friends after soaring to meet Jesus up in the sky. Mark Heard is a supermarket shelf-stocker from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a region that undoubtedly abounds with the unsaved. According to the Bible in the News segment of today's Southwest Radio Church broadcast, Mark was fiddling with his on-line stock investment portfolio when it occurred to him that his wife would be unable to access his account after the rapture.

Apparently Mark is “unequally yoked” with a nonbeliever, but he still loves her enough to want her to have enough money to survive the tribulation period and the terrors of Satan's seven-year rule over the unraptured. That's when Mark had the idea (undoubtedly put in his head by God, probably by the Holy Spirit third of the Trinity) that he should stash important information where his wife could obtain it. While most people might then go out and buy a fireproof bedroom safe, stuff it with documents, and give the wife a key, Mark was not willing to settle for such a mundane solution. (Besides, his wife is unsaved. She'd open the safe the first time he turned his back and rob him blind. Right?)

Instead Mark cleverly created youvebeenleftbehind.com, a website that promises to sprinkle your loved ones with electronic manna after your rapture departure. It “gives you one last opportunity to reach your lost family and friends For Christ.” (Why the “for” is capitalized is one of God's little mysteries.) You can store up to 250 megabytes of crucial information your loved ones will need after you are snatched from the bosom of your family. Imagine writing long, detailed, I-told-you-so screeds from which they can take spiritual comfort as Satan's minions rampage all about them. You can convey messages to as many as 62 e-mail addresses, which will be delivered approximately six days after the rapture occurs. The triggering mechanism is a kind of dead man's switch. Five members of the youvebeenleftbehind.com team have been scattered about the globe as we await the second coming of Jesus. If three days pass without at least three team members logging in, the clock starts ticking. In the absence of intervention, the messages go out three days later.

I presume that Mark Heard must be one of the five team members and I'm guessing that all of the team members are confident they'll be raptured up. Even if they're wrong, would they be disgruntled enough upon being left behind to continue to log in and thus hold back their clients' archived messages? That would not be a Christian thing to do, would it?

This service is available for only $40 for the first year of enrollment. If the Lord tarries—as he has been wont to do for nearly two thousand years now—renewal fees “will be will be reduced as the number of subscribers increases. Tell your friends about You've Been [sic] left behind.”

But presumably not with a left-behind message.

Heads of the class

Cultivating the mind

Teachers can count on book companies to flood our mail boxes with promotional materials. Full-color fliers and review copies of textbooks pour into our offices. Unfortunately, the books are often difficult to distinguish from each other and the promotional pitches all contain the same breathless prose about pedagogical breakthroughs and “student success.”

However, sometimes—and I admit this is rare—something breaks away from the pack and catches your eye. One such example was unearthed during a recent archaeological dig in my school archives, the stacks of material that clutter the drawers and shelves (and many other flat surfaces) of my office and home. This item had originally come into my possession over ten years ago and I was struck by its imaginative visuals. Decapitated students!

Not really, of course. But Quant Systems made a splash with its bizarre agricultural metaphor. My students, I'm sure, would hasten to add details about appropriate fertilizing materials.

The 800 number in the advertisement, by the way, still works. Although Quant Systems has since been transformed into Hawkes Learning Systems, the company survives. It was a leader in educational courseware and stylish fashions for math teachers, as well as one of the first to recognize the importance of the equation c² = 4d² + x³ + 7.

Excuse me, I have to go water my students now.

Blog Archive