2008-10-15

lizzybennet: (blog)
2008-10-15 05:33 pm

(no subject)

Work has picked up and we are swamped in orders for Christmas cards with cranes, bulldozers, and concrete trucks on the front. Today I formatted a card with a concrete trucking pouring concrete into square boxes and building snowmen out of the squares. Bizarre...but not as bizarre as the card with Rudolph airbrushing snowmen rainbow colors.

Seems like all the other employees are excited that we're finally busy. Today someone actually said to me, in a happy tone of voice, "This means 12 hour days!" I know they expect this overtime as part of their work year, they look forward to the opportunity to earn extra money. I just don't share the enthusiasm. To me, it's just a job and nothing more. It's a means to pay for our trip home this Christmas.

I've been using this search aggregator for school called Dialog. These huge, massive search tools charge per minute. As students, we don't have to pay but we can see our total at the end of our session. It found it very interesting to see that after I completed my homework last night my total charges would have been over $26. That was for two searches: articles on the Library of Congress and general information on medical uses of marijuana. Well, I say two searches, but actually I performed closer to thirty searches until I narrowed it down to what I was looking for. Dialog itself is very different from any other type of search tool I've used in the past. There is no "keyword" box or any other sort of subject box. Instead, we have to use code to tell Dialog what we want.

Here's an example:

s medic?(w)marijuana
s1 and cannibus

t s1/3/1-10

My point is, the skills I'm learning now are so much more concrete than what I did for my history degree. I love that there is a right and wrong answer! I'm enjoying school a lot, I just wish I could give it more of my time and attention.

Josh feels better. Thanks for all your well wishes!