An hour and a half!

It’s been less than a month since there was snow on the ground. How could people have forgotten how to drive on it?

Normally the commute between Ypsi and Ann Arbor doesn’t take ninety minutes. Today was an exception. I’m tempted to bring my camera along on my lunch break and take some pictures of the springtime winter that we’ve got going on.

To top it off, I had a bit of trouble getting started this morning. Did you ever have one of those dreams when you dream that you’re awake? I had nested versions of that this morning. I’d get up, turn off the alarm, head upstairs to shower, the alarm would go off, I’d get up, turn off the alarm, head upstairs to shower, the alarm would go off… The snooze button is my enemy.

I was also offering not-terribly-coherent answers to my Fiancee’s questions. At one point she asked me if she should let me snooze for a while or if I wanted to get up. “What do you want to do?”

My answer? “Yellow.”

I’m still not sure what I thought she’d asked.

Even compared to the crappy driving conditions, the waking dreams were the worst part of the morning. I hate those… The strangest I ever had was when I was living in what my friends still call the “Hellhole Apartment.” I was taking summer semester classes and working as a “Consultant” for the University’s Information Technology Division.

Here’s the basic background: I was a roving help-desk person. I’d be at a different computer lab every day of the week, helping people with questions about various programs. It was a good customer service type position, and it helped me learn how to deal with people in a panic. I didn’t have very much special training… I’d started out as a computer science major, so I’d spent a lot of time fiddling with everything from the old MTS mainframe to basic troubleshooting of the dial-in networking systems. Eventually, I got to be quite good at reading the documentation and regurgitating it in an easier to digest form.

Yeah, that’s some pretty disgusting imagery there. But it does help to explain why the cartoony icon for Linux is a penguin…

At any rate, I got to be pretty good at helping people. Enough so that it became something of a problem. Every Saturday I would work at Angell Hall, and there was one guy that we’d nicknamed “Calvin Clipboard.” He would come in because he knew that I’d take the time to answer all of the questions that he’d saved up during the week. He’d go through his clipboard full of problems and cross them out once I’d answered them. At the end of it all he’d always ask, “How did you learn all of this? Is there some sort of class I could take that would explain this all?” and I’d explain that I’d picked up what I knew through immersion and documentation.

One Saturday, I had a waking dream. I’d gone to work and Calvin Clipboard was there with his list of questions. I went through them all, and at the end he asked about classes. But since this was a dream, instead of giving him the usual disclaimer, I snapped. I went off on an old-guy-voice rant, letting him know how much tougher we had it back in the good old days…

“No, there ain’t no sissified booklarnin’ classes! I’ve had to pick this all up by making mistakes and learning from them! We didn’t have any of these fancy machines like you’ve got today, no sir! We had Mac Plusses with twin 800k floppy drives, if we were lucky! There weren’t any of those namby-pamby unix boxes either! We had a crusty old mainframe, and we loved it! It was so archaic that you had to talk to it with a tin can and a piece of string! And the tin can had to be empty, which is why we called it Empty-Ess!”

They shut down the MTS mainframe in 1996, so practically nobody will get that joke. I’m going for quality over quantity though. The right people will laugh…

Or at least chuckle.