Picture this: 12 people sitting at a rectangular table. There are five people on each of the long sides and one on each of the short sides.
11 of those people are going to be handling booklets that must go to five people. They cannot work with the booklet more than once. So each is instucted to “pass the booklets to your right.” The 12th person, one of the people sitting on a short side of the table, leaves her spot to do something else.
10 people can handle passing the booklets to the right. The 11th person, says “There’s no one to my right, so I’ll have to pass to the left” since he’s sitting at the end near where the 12th person had been.
How can someone with a college degree be too fucking stupid to realize that the person to their right is then the one across from them?! And why the hell does this need to be explained to him three times?!
For fuck’s sake, Man, Did you get your degree out of a monkey’s ass? This isn’t rocket science!
I know what you’re thinking, what’s the big deal. When the stupid asshole sends things around the wrong way, we get back booklets we’ve already handled, so it’s a pain in the ass to look through them to find out, especially since the fucking things are almost impossible to fold back to the “right” way again since there are so many pages. My god damn hands already ache from trying to fold the damn things, don’t add to be because you’re too stupid to grasp the fact that if there’s no one to your immediate right you go to the other side of the table. Have you ever seen a fucking clock? Honestly, if he’s too dumb to pass the booklets correctly, is he really competent to work with them? Good thing there’s quality control…
It’s a sad day indeed when a young woman is tempted to beat an elderly man to death with a stack of folded test booklets. Stupid old bastard.
[sub] I know you know stupid people with degrees too. Feel free to hijack as long as it’s about other stupid college educated people.[/sub]
Well, I just cut up chili peppers without using gloves, then scratched the back of my neck (where I’ve been fighting a minor–well, was minor–psoriasis problem). So, beat that…
I’ve been doing comparison shopping for a Medicare discount card. I asked one card company how much discount they would give me for premarin .625 miligrams. She asked me if I was sure of the dosage – that they didn’t have one listed. I reassured her that I was positive. She read off the list of dosages. I stopped her when she got to the one that said, " 0.625."
I know something you don’t know … I know something you don’t know … Nya, nya!
I can’t speak for every company that was offering these, but I imagine strategies across the industry were very similar to ours. For the first three weeks after the new Medicare law took effect, about 90% of the calls that came in inquiring about discount cards were handled by temporary employees hired to handle the expected high call volume. They were hired the week before, got two days of training, then put out on the phones … My boss and I coordinated compiling the quality monitoring stats for the program across all of our centers nationwide, and it was not at all pretty, especially the first week. :eek:
The temps are all gone now (again, ours are-other companies may still be using some), and if you call again, you have a much better chance of getting somebody who knows what they’re doing …
My sister is a constant reminder to me that just because you have a really high IQ, doesn’t mean you have EQ. You don’t need EQ to be a uni student. She is a uni lecturer, has a PhD in micropaleantology and an incredible general knowledge, but she doesn’t have self-regulation or self-awareness skills.
Also, your uni student may be dyslexic - having problems with left/right and clockwise/anti-clockwise - and there is no correlation between having a learning disability and intelligence.
So, let me get this straight. You have a 5x1 table. You are, presumably, sitting on one of the short ends. You begin passing out booklets, and choose to pass them widdershins around three sides of the table, rather than passing them up both sides of the table simultaneously?
I realize this would have required your implied directions to be rather more specific, as “the person to your right” would have been the person to the left for the people on the left side of the table, rather than having “the person to your right” be the person in front for the person on the end of the right side of the table.
I’d wager that fellow in the right hand corner, bein’ all edumucated, thought you were passing the booklets down both sides of the table simultaneously, rather than attempting to pass a booklet all the way down one side of the table and back up the other, and just figured you had miscounted… and so was sending the extras back up.
MelCthefirst, since there was someone to his left, and not his right, saying he had to send them back because there was no one next to him would make him blind, not dyslexic. A dyslexic would have just gave them to the wrong person, not claimed the person didn’t exist. Not to mention he’s a former teacher, not a student.
Um… nope, it’s the the person to your right no matter which side of the table you got it from since there’s chairs on the short ends to bridge the gap. The people on the other side of the table would be passing to my left, but that doesn’t matter.
We weren’t passing things out, though. What we were doing is this: every person got a stack of test booklets, and they scored two of the responses in it. The state this was for does not want a person to score any more than two questions per book, so given there are a dozen or so questions in each book, a lot of people had to score the same booklet to complete it -not to mention the questions worth more than a single point needed to be scored by two different people. If you passed the ones you scored to the person on your right (or could have been left if everyone went the same direction) it means that the booklets didn’t return to the people who’d already scored them. Since this person was sending them the wrong way, they were going back to people who had scored them.
Thank god it’s only booklets like this for three more boxes before we go back to scoring the responses on the computer. Assessing an ESL student’s proficiency in English should be the hardest part of the process, but it’s not.
Although, it was mildly entertaining listen to a supervisor scream at our boss this morning because he gave the other two groups “rules” that made paper flow even harder…this morning he claimed she either came up with the rule herself, or heard it from someone other than him. Since she’s significantly less of a flake then him, I don’t think anyone is inclined to believe his claim. :wally
I enjoy the irony that you’re grading an ESL test.
Anyway, I can see how teaching ESL would lead to a rather literal and rigid way of thinking about English. You’d probably get in the habit of speaking very precisely, because your students wouldn’t be able to follow all the implications of imprecise speech.
So, when someone says “Pass these to the person to your right.” you’d naturally assume they mean “Pass these to the person to your right.” and not fill in the “unless you’re on the end, in which case the person in front of you, across the table, is what I mean by ‘to your right’.”. Especially if there were a bunch of potentially confusing instructions about how many questions you were allowed to grade.
Like I said, if you meant for them to pass the booklets widdershins about the table, it would have been better to say so.
You mean how our supervisor orginally said to pass them counterclockwise? " Pass them to the person on your right" was a clarification when the instuction to pass them counterclockwise seemed not to sink in… I suppose I ought to have mentioned that
“Pass them clockwise” should also have worked, no? But yes, I’d expect it to be fairly clear the idea was to pass them all round the table, so ‘pass right’ would fit the universal usage of ‘imagining you’re in a circle’.
However, we all get brain farts occasionally. What’s weird is that no-one noticed and said “No, you pass to [him].”
Was that directed at me? I was making the point that surely it doesn’t matter which way you pass them, so you might as well pick the most easily said direction.
Perhaps my sentance was one of the very, very, few in the english language which would be made clearer by replacing ‘clockwise’ with ‘deosil’
