There’s a definite value in giving kids certain items to play with while young, to help them learn how the world works. To avoid this particular situation, a compass, even a cheapo one, should work wonders…
I had a young coworker who always complained that she couldn’t read my handwriting when I’d leave notes or memos for her. My handwriting isn’t Palmer Method perfect or anything, but I’ve always felt it was completely legible. So I’d try my best to make my notes as clear as possible, always to be told that a task was not done or was done incorrectly because she “could not read my handwriting”. I finally, finally discovered what she meant by this: she couldn’t read cursive— at all.
Apparently, cursive just isn’t taught any more in wide swaths of the country…
And maybe a globe.
ALMOST the same as what happened to me. It was my first job, and after a while, I had asked for a raise. He said he’d think about it, or work on it. I don’t remember his exact words, but I didn’t expect anything immediate.
A few weeks later, it was pay day, and something had gotten messed up with my paycheck, so they gave me a replacement check. I looked at it, and noticed that the “Qty” column said “1” instead of the number of hours I had worked, but the total gross looked right, and all the deductions looked right, and most importantly, the net was more or less the same as what I usually got. (I was paid hourly, and of course the total would vary somewhat, from week to week.)
A few days later, I gently and respectfully asked my boss about the status of my request. He was genuinely surprised. “We put you on salary last week! You didn’t notice it on your paycheck?” My only response was, “No, I’ll take another look.”
You probably figured out what happened: He did indeed give me a raise. My weekly salary was indeed higher than 40 hours had gotten me before. But I was actually putting in about 42-43 hours per week, which henceforth dropped to about 40.5 (so as not to get labeled as a clockwatcher).
Boss probably thought that I was an ungrateful smartass. I didn’t know how to tell him that the confusion over the replacement check is why I didn’t notice it. He probably wasn’t even aware that the paycheck needed to be replaced.
Very true. A bit of history on this is in Wikipedia: Cursive handwriting instruction in the United States
Now, can someone tell me how to link to a Wikipedia article so that the first lines show up, instead of just the hyperlink? (I’ve been using the “link” icon, and I don’t see anything Wiki-specific.)
Post the wiki link on its own line, like this:
Thank you. I found that answer elsewhere. (Pretty counter-intuitive IMHO that it would be specifically WITHOUT any sort of markup code.)
Definitely a globe. It explains so much.
There was a story going around that Ireland was going to switch to driving on the right. Why? Probably for the same reason as the US, to stick a finger up to Perfidious Albion.
When asked how the changeover would be handled, a minister said that all the trucks would switch first, and all the cars would switch a week later.
Remember how, after 9/11, all those planes had to land in Gander? A week or so later we had a couple of teenagers in the house and the story was being discussed. Apparently it had come up in a lesson at their school.
The problem was that when they looked at a map, they couldn’t see why they would have been anywhere near Newfoundland . I dusted off our globe, found a piece of string, and demonstrated great circles. Yay me…
Exactly! Great circles also explain why, flying between CA or WA to Japan, we always seem to “hug the coast” of Canada and Alaska. It wasn’t just for the safety of having airports along our route, it was also to make the flight distance shorter.
This doesn’t work if you’re driving in England!
::d&r::
When we flew to Seoul from LAX we did this, which surprised me, but made sense when I thought about it.
This only works if you know how to snap your fingers. I do not. 
I grew up not too far from the northern shore of Lake Ontario. So, always in the back of my mind was the feeling that there was a southern limit to my surroundings. Cities and towns could sprawl east, west, and north as much as they wanted, but to the south was always water stretching off to the horizon.
Then I went to Ottawa. There, the watery limit is on the north: the Ottawa River containing the boundary with Québec. It was always very slightly disorienting being there; there was a slight feeling of hanging off the ceiling with the tendrils of the city dangling into the southern void…
When my wife and I fly from Detroit to Nagoya (Japan), our departure path is actually north-northwest. It makes sense when you plot a straight path on Google Earth, but when you’re looking at Google Maps, a “straight” path looks like it should go west-southwest.
Interesting. I’ve never lived more than an hour away from the Atlantic ocean, so I also think of east as moving towards it. But west is also getting closer to that other body of water way over there.
Yeah, that sounds like the same phenomenon.
I knew in the abstract that the Pacific was to the west; but whatever portion of my mind was used to doing the navigating didn’t believe it; which I didn’t realize until I found myself trying to navigate near/on the coast of California. Maybe you don’t have the same reaction, or maybe you would if you spent a month in Santa Cruz or wherever on the Pacific coast – have you ever done that?
I’m near Denver, where the mountains are to the west. When I go to Salt Lake city, the mountains are to the east, and I feel like I’m in some sort of mirror dimension. Which might actually be true, I mean compare: magic mushrooms legal vs. begrudgingly let you buy beer, if you order some food with it.