Blog: Articles filed under work

I always forget that November is a busy month. October lulls me into a false sense of security, for despite its containment of midterms, it never really has much work for me. Then November comes around, and suddenly it’s whoa. Where did all this homework come from? Oh, and I’m working all weekend for a fundraising event at the gallery? Great.

This weekend was probably my busiest weekend of the year in terms of inverse amount of free time available to me. I spent the week working on an essay for my Medieval and Tudor Drama class, which I love. The prof is great, and I‘m learning a lot and reading literature I probably wouldn’t otherwise read. The essay was originally due Friday, but the prof extended it to Wednesday, which is a great relief. I‘m feeling confident about it, but the extra time has helped.

So yeah, this weekend was the art gallery’s annual Christmas House Tour fundraiser. This consists of a self-guided tour of houses decorated by local businesses. Today was the tour proper, so we had to work 9-5 for that. Friday night was the dinner for the home owners, and I worked that with Brittany. On Saturday, people who paid an extra $10 could view the homes by night and come to the gallery for a special reception. That was a long night, and by the time we finished at 11 PM, I was ready to go to bed. After all, I had to get up and go to the gallery by 9 the next morning!

I was giving Brittany and Thea a ride home. It snowed for the first time yesterday, so the parking lot was full of great packing snow. While I was brushing the snow off my car, Brittany and Thea instigated an impromptu snowball fight involving them, myself, and Lesya, another coworker who was also de-snowing her vehicle.

I haven’t had a snowball fight in ages! It was great. Cars provide interesting cover, but we were close enough that my terrible aim wasn’t much of a problem. And Thea threw a snowball that hit me right in the face—which was awesome.

So as we were driving, we decided that instead of immediately going home, we would go for a walk from Thea’s house. Several stops later so that Brittany and I could obtain clothes more appropriate for outdoors, we had conceived of and discarded the idea of building a snowman in Thea’s front yard. Rather, we walked to the nearest Tim Hortons, where we got tea and hot chocolate. I’ve never been in a Tim Hortons so late at night, and it was a little eerie. The building was so brightly lit compared to outside, and it was nearly empty—but not quite.

On the way back to Thea’s house, we passed a house where one of my brother’s friends lives, and my brother was leaving it. So we said hi, and as his massive green truck drove past, we took aim at it with more snowballs. Then Brittany and Thea took aim at me, and I had my second snowball fight of the night.

That’s right: first snowfall of the year, and I’ve already had two snowball fights. If you feel envious, that’s because you are.

I’ve had a long week. There are more long weeks ahead, as the term finishes and this whole Christmas season descends upon us, though I kick and scream the entire way. But all that stress and fatigue drains out of me when I think about how much fun I had tossing some snow at people. It reminds me that I don’t spend enough time doing that sort of thing—embracing the kid in me and just having fun, not because I have the free time, but because the snow and the people are there. We were all tired, but we took a moment to put our essays and our assignments aside, to stop and enjoy the snow and the night, to pause prior to another long day of work.

And that was good.

Last week, I discussed how maths is hard, but I spent plenty of time solving a Rubik’s cube anyway. At this rate, you are going to get the idea that I don’t do any work at all. Nevertheless, a desire for accuracy and lulz requires me to remain truthful regarding how I spent this week in the office.

We made a piñata.

We named him Stanley the Resurrection Pig.

I don’t recall who came up with the initial idea. As with all good, crazy plots, it starts off as an innocuous hypothetical scenario: piñatas equal fun, fun equal good, we could make a piñata! This is the last week all four of us will be in the office together—Aaron, Rachael, and I are going to Waterloo next week for a conference, and Jessica is off to Ireland, returning only after Aaron and Rachael’s contracts are finished. So if ever there was a time to set aside the math papers and construct a papier-mâché animal, then savagely beat it to a pulp, this was that time.

None of us are piñata-making experts, and that was probably for the best. Rachael had some experience with papier-mâché—also for the best—so we made her foreman and gave her a silly newspaper hat to go with the title. In remarkably little time, we gathered together the hodge-podge of materials required to manufacture a piñata. We decided on a simple shape, assembled the skeletal structure from balloons, and mixed up a batch of goo to begin the work of creating Stanley.

Over three days, Stanley emerged from a series of colour balloons. He grew stubby legs, ears, and a snout. We named him Stanley because none of us knew anyone named Stanley, and it sounded like a good name for something we would beat to death. (I apologize to all those named Stanley reading this.) Jessica, in particular, was quite bloodthirsty about the whole project. By Friday, however, as we stuffed Stanley full of candy and trussed him in string, we were all savouring the anticipation of Resurrection-Pigpocalpyse.

Stanley met his demise rather quickly. We took him outside, where it was the warmest it has been all summer so far, and suspended him upon a suitable tree branch. Jessica, as the aforementioned most eager participant in this piñata-bashing, got the first swing. I had brought a thin, metal beam that had been propped up in one corner of the hallway outside our office with other thin, metal beams, but we started with a stick to maximize Stanley’s torment. After a few swings from Jessica, however, the stick broke in two. Stanley one, us zero.

So we switched to the metal beam, and Stanley’s death came swift. Jessica pretty much decapitated him with a single, fearsome blow. Aaron, Rachael, and I quickly followed, each of us contributing to his destruction in our own way, until finally he lay on the ground, battered and broken, a shell of his former self.

Stanley was no more. But in his death, he gave us one final gift: lots and lots of candy. Oh, and math riddles. But moreso candy. Really, way too much candy. We had all brought candy, and even though much of the chocolate melted from the heat, there was more than we wanted to take home with us. There is still some of it languishing in the office despite our forthcoming week-long absence.

I could talk about what I‘ve been researching this week, how my supervising prof was in town only for the two days we were dunking our hands in flour-water to make a piñata in the office. I could mention that I’ve started running programs on SHARCNET and it’s awesome. Really, all of these things pale in comparison to spending a week making, and breaking, a piñata.

This was the eighth week of my research. I’m now halfway through my summer job, and it feels like I’ve barely begun. Wow.

Farewell, Stanley the Resurrection Pig. You served but a brief, miserable existence, but you served it well. So long, and thanks for all the fish—er, candy.

I like to joke with my friends about how easy I have it this summer. I‘m sitting in a cozy little office with a fan, proximity to a kettle, and a high-speed Internet connection. Unlike a summer research student in, say, chemistry or biology, I don’t have to manipulate lab equipment or sex fruit flies (Cassie :P). The extent of my experimentation will involve uploading programs to a high-powered computing network and asking it kindly to compute a few more numbers for me. I Google math papers relevant to my problem, try to understand what they say, and see if I can come up with my own ideas. One thing I love about math research, especially in my area of interest, is how much it’s thought. All I really need is a blackboard and chalk, or pencil and paper. (That being said, the high-powered computing network does help when I get to the computation step!)

Of course, it’s not all fun and games (even though I did learn how to solve a Rubik’s cube last week). Maths is hard! And right now, even though I’ve been in university for three years, I feel like an amateur groping around an unsolved problem. I know that research can be like that in general, and I’m still having lots of fun—and learning a lot. Nevertheless, sometimes I feel like a poser. And nothing is worse than a math poser!

I was all excited, two weeks ago, because I had almost finished an algorithm to compute the spreading number recursively. I was tackling the problem as one of finding a maximum independent set. The spreading number is, among other things, the cardinality of the maximum independent set of a certain type of graph. (The covering number is an analogous clique cover cardinality). The general problem of finding a maximum independent set is NP-hard. This means that there likely isn’t a very efficient algorithm for solving the problem (if there were, then P=NP, and that’s way above my pay grade). The best I could hope for was a good algorithm for my specific case; indeed, that was my hope for this algorithm.

After returning from the weekend, I finished the algorithm and happily set Macaulay2 to work, asking it to compute the spreading numbers and compare it with the values we already know. Alas, there were discrepancies, and I quickly understood why: I had made a fundamentally flawed assumption in constructing the algorithm. So while the algorithm did exactly what I wanted it to do, it turns out that what I wanted would not give me the graph’s maximum independent set.

Back to square one!

Frustrated but not very surprised am I. The problem is non-trivial, so I did not really expect such a simple solution. And I have plenty of summer left in which to try new ideas. Right now I am looking at Hilbert series. Most computer algebra systems, including Macaulay2, use Hilbert series to compute the dimension of rings (and this is how my professor’s orginal algorithm computes the spreading number). For larger rings, this computation takes up too much memory.

The easiest solution is, of course, to throw more memory at the problem. We had hoped my computer would be able to compute at least another two or three of the numbers, but this was not to be. Even without any refinements to the algorithm, however, SHARCNET should blow my computer out of the water. This week, I am looking at ways of breaking the computation of the Hilbert series into independent tasks so I can make use of throughput computing.

Oh, and I did learn how to solve a Rubik’s cube. I obtained one in my young adolescent days, but because I have poor spatial skills, I was never able to solve it on my own. Last week I observed Rachael manipulating her cube like a pro. I expressed my admiration and awe, and she just shrugged and mentioned that it was a matter of using certain algorithms (which makes sense). I was doubtful of my ability to learn the necessary algorithms; fortunately, I think I understand enough now to solve the cube reliably. I doubt I’ll ever be a speedcuber, but that is one puzzle down.

Now back to my shiny infinite polynomial series.

Yes, yes, I know. At this rate, my weekly recap will become bi-weekly. I didn’t do a lot the week before last, owing to Victoria Day making for a shortened week. So rather than two very short blog posts, I decided to forbear and write one short blog post instead.

The last two weeks have been more reading, more learning, and a little thinking. I hesitate to ascribe a label like “productive,” since it’s hard to quantify. I think I understand my problem now, but there remains a lot for me to learn in order to start trying solutions.

I tried running the original algorithm for computing the spreading number, which was written in CoCoA, on my computer. I had hoped that my 2 GB of RAM and 1.83 GHz processor would have enough memory to compute some additional numbers. Alas, CoCoA stubbornly crashed (after several long hours) each time I instructed it to do so.

So I ported the code to Macaulay2. It’s even slower, which makes me suspicious that I’m missing something—after all, I am learning both languages, so I‘m sure that in transliterating the code I managed to miss an obvious way to make it more efficient. Still, it looks like the original algorithm won’t produce many more useful results, at least not until I stick it on SHARCNET.

My supervising prof pointed me to a series of lectures he gave on combinatoric commutative algebra. Last week I started working through those, and I’ll continue doing so this week. He’s given me several promising “leads,” I suppose you‘d call them, but at this point, I have to start exploring avenues of interest and seeing if they produce any interesting results. I’ve already toyed with some alternative approaches in Macaulay2, familiarizing myself more with the language, but I think I need more experience with the mathematics first.

Probably the most significant news of the past two weeks would be my decision to attend the Canadian Undergraduate Mathematics Conference at the University of Waterloo and the Combinatorics & Optimization Summer School preceding it. Initially I was reluctant to go, because I don’t like to travel, but Aaron and (maybe) Rachael are going, so I won’t be alone. Plus, I’ll get to visit my grandparents. That’s July 5-10, a few more weeks away. Until then … time for more learning.

Shorter entry this week, as I didn’t do much new and exciting in week 2 of my research project. I‘m still having fun, but because it’s so early in the summer, that fun mostly takes the form of reading.

As tweeted earlier, the secret to reading (and understanding) math papers is simple. First, always read it twice. Then read it again. But to make sure you really understand, you need to take notes. Write down what’s implicit in the paper, the steps the author leaves out because “it is obvious” or “it is clear to the reader” or, even worse, “this has been left has an exercise for the reader.” Once you‘ve done that, the final step is to read the paper again.

I spent all week reading two papers, one of which expands on the findings of the other. The first investigates the spreading and covering numbers in relation to the ideal generation conjecture. Much of the paper goes over my head. Nevertheless, there were some very useful figures, and the use of graph theory in one paper and set theory in another helped improve my comprehension of what these numbers are. The second paper, in particular, was devoted to finding explicit values and bounds for the covering number using a combinatorial/set theory approach.

One of my goals is to improve, if I can, upon the bounds found in these papers. The actual values computed by my supervising prof suggest that there’s room for improvement. I’m a little daunted by this prospect. I feel like I understand the proofs present in these two papers regarding the bounds for the covering number … but I‘m not so sure I understand the procedures well enough to build upon them. Granted, I’ve only been doing this for two weeks. As the summer progresses, I’ll learn more and become more confident. For now, however, I’m just a wee bit intimidated by what I will try to accomplish.

Don’t mistake trepidation for discontent. The best is yet to come! Soon I’ll be playing with CoCoA and Macaulay2. This week, I‘m learning about resolution, which leads to a generalizatio of dimension from ordinary vector spaces to modules. Oh, and I’m having a lot of fun learning how to typeset my proofs in LaTeX. Math is totally the language of the universe, and LaTeX is its markup.

I am now into the second week of my NSERC summer research project. So far, I’m having a lot of fun. The subject of my research is interesting and exactly the type of mathematics that I want to study. The “daily grind,” such as it is, does not grind at all—it helps that there are three other undergraduate students doing research this summer, and we all share the sessional lecturer office. We can distract each other, when needed, and pick each other’s brains for help with particularly puzzling proofs.

So what exactly am I doing? Well, it’s esoteric even for those who enjoyed math up until the first years of university. I‘m going to drop some math jargon in the next few paragraphs, so don’t worry if your eyes start to glaze over. Photos and hilarious video will follow!

Since my prof was leaving town at the end of the week, we met several times so he could give me some lectures and we could discuss my project. The work I’m doing relates to ring theory, which is a course I took nearly two years ago, so I have a lot of review to do. Most of the week, like the next few weeks will, involved preliminaries. I found all of the references my prof recommended to me. I began reading the three textbooks among those references, learning about monomial ideals and simplicial complexes.

These, however, are but means to an end. After I have mastered the secrets of these wonderful algebraic concepts, I can use them toward the eventual goal of finding better algorithms for calculating the spreading and covering numbers. These relate to the maximum and minimum dimension, respectively, of a monomial subspace of a vector space over all polynomials of a given degree such that the subspace fulfils two respective properties.

On Thursday, my prof went over what’s changed since he and his colleagues wrote the paper from which my research project comes. In particular, they’ve learned about a connection between edge ideals and the Stanley-Reisner ideal. In the paper, they showed that calculating the dimension of the Stanley-Reisner ring is sufficient to find the spreading number. (A similiar result makes calculating the covering number possible.)

This connection is really cool for two reasons. Firstly, it makes the connection to graph theory stronger, which gives us another avenue for exploring the problem. Secondly, it might provide an alternative way ofcalculating spreading numbers (graph theory is also useful in this respect). The algorithm in the paper finds the Stanley-Reisner ring and then uses a computer algebra system to find the dimension of the ring. They did this on a Pentium II, so they could only find a few of the numbers before the calculations became impractical given the available computer memory. Computing power has improved considerably since then, so my first step will be to see how my little laptop compares against their Pentium II using the algorithm in the paper. Later in the summer, I’ll be creating alternative (hopefully more efficient) algorithms in Macaulay2 and running them on SHARCNET.

Of the three other students sharing the office with me this summer, Aaron is in the same year as me, and Jessica and Rachael are a year behind us. Aaron and Rachel are working on the same project, which involves fractals and Cantor sets. Jessica is also working on something related to commutative algebra (affine varieties and Gröbner bases). So not only do I get to learn about simplicial complexes and monomial ideals, but I’ll be learning about affine spaces and some more real analysis as well.

And for those of you who wonder exactly what math research looks like, I can attest that it’s pretty much like this clip from The Big Bang Theory. Aaron and I spent a good deal of Friday afternoon staring at my faulty proof regarding prime ideals on the chalk board. I did manage to figure it out eventually, but imagine if we had had a montage!

Last night, all four of us who work at the front desk went out for dinner and bowling. I don’t go out that much—and in fact, I probably spend more time hanging out with these three at work than I do going places with my other friends. But it was Brittany’s last weekend in town, because she’s biking back home to Guelph next week. So we had one last hurrah—and a little bit more.

First we went to Applebee‘s, which is pretty much the baseline measurement for normality on this outing. I had a steak that was supposed to be medium but was rare and soggy French fries. Thea and Dayna had more luck with their pasta dishes, and Brittany made quick work of her sizzling fajitas. Surprisingly, they appeared as advertised and were actually sizzling. There was also spicy rice, which she saved for another friend, because she didn’t like it. More on that later. Many stories were exchanged that cannot, of course, be repeated here. Brittany and I ordered desserts while Thea and Dayna demurred; I got a chocolate chip sundae, and Britany made the better choice of a delectable soft brownie. That was probably the best food part of the meal.

After Applebee’s, the plan was to go bowling. I, being the careful and attentive driver that I am, promptly drove the car forward out of the parking spot, intending to cut through the adjacent parking lot and leave that way. The only problem was the concrete parking barrier standing in my way, small enough that I had forgotten it was there. The front wheels of the car made it over. The back wheels … not so much.

Or, as Thea likes to tell the story, “You just sort of … kept going. And there was a scraping noise.” Thanks Thea.

So I called my brother, who is the car expert in our household. He would know what to do. Fortunately, while we were waiting for him to arrive, someone else stopped and helped us extricate the car from its new perch. We put the car in neutral, and then all of us lifted the rear end and pushed it forward. Manual effort for the win!

Shortly thereafter, my brother rolled up in a very badass manner, his bright green truck as obtrusive as possible as he parked on the grass in front of where I had parked the car (as far from any barriers as I could manage). After a quick look at the underside of the car and an inspection under the hood, he prounounced us good to go.

And so we went bowling.

Thea’s mom and her mom’s friend showed up at the bowling alley at the same time that we did. This, of course, prompted the nth retelling of my already infamous adventure in the Applebee’s parking lot. It will go down in history alongside the phone book story.

The six of us bowled together. I love bowling. I don’t know why. I’m not great at it—good, not great—but there’s just something about the collegial atmosphere, the shared experience of hurling a massive object on a collision course with those pins… . It’s one of my favourite group activities. And my dancing went over well. We all had fun, I think. Despite my excessive posturing to the contrary, however, Thea emerged victorious in both games.

So I had an interesting night, and a good night. It was a good way to celebrate this year at the front desk. I’ve been lucky to have awesome coworkers pretty much consistently for the entire four years I‘ve worked at the art gallery. Trying to compare them would not do them justice. They’re all wonderful, and while I miss some more than others, I have stories to tell about each and every one of them. That is, without a doubt, the best part of working at the gallery: my front desk coworkers.

We move on. This is the one constant in my life with which I will always struggle. I don’t like change, and once I find equilibrium, I am loath to see it thrown out of balance by someone’s absence. It can’t be helped, though, and it’s for the best. None of us will be working at the gallery during the summer, and it remains to be seen who will be back in the fall. We’ll stay in touch, I hope, and continue sharing stories. But I can always celebrate the times we’ve had together.

This year, I got to share and create stories with three great women. I got to see high school again, see the first year of university through an art student’s eyes, and have good conversations about books, movies, and yeah, even art. We made a good team, we had each other’s backs, and we got the job done. I couldn’t ask for more. And if I had to lodge my car on top of a stubby concrete parking barrier, I wouldn’t want to do it in the company of any other people.

This January, I applied for a summer Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) from the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council (NSERC). Lakehead University has 20 such awards to give to applicants this year, and on Monday, I learned that I am the recipient of one!

I was (still am) a mixture of elation and trepidation. Part of me is still in a state of shock and can’t quite believe that this is real. I spend a good half hour after learning I got the grant just trying to calm down so I would not run up to everyone I encountered and yell, “I GOT A GRANT!” Another part of me is saying, “What do you think you‘re doing, Ben? You don’t even understand what it is you’re going to be researching!” As anyone who has ever looked at a higher math textbook knows, the language is just scary sometimes.

I applied for the NSERC grant for two reasons. Firstly, it’s a different summer employment opportunity than my default, which is the art gallery. Don’t get me wrong: I love working at the gallery. You can’t beat the hours, and I have an awesome boss—she took the news that I wouldn’t be working there over the summer much easier than I thought she would. Nevertheless, I’ve worked there for four consecutive summers. I‘m not averse to trying something new, particularly something related to my area of interest.

Secondly, since this is a research position, I’ll get a chance to experience exactly what “math research” is all about. Sometimes people will ask me why I’m becoming a high school teacher instead of going on to graduate school and becoming a professor; usually my answer is somewhere along the lines that I‘m not sure I’d like doing “math research” and writing “math papers.” I‘m more in it for the teaching. This grant is a perfect way to see if, in fact, I like or dislike doing research, without committing to something like graduate school first.

So I’m excited about this change, but also just a little bit anxious—it is a big change in how I’ll be spending my summer, and a different responsibility. After four years at the gallery, I’m so used to doing the same thing every summer that it’s hard imagining myself doing anything else.

The position itself is a full-time for 16 weeks. My area of interest in mathematics lies in commutative algebra, so Dr. Adam Van Tuyl has agreed to be my supervisor. He’s come up with a neat project for me, and I’ll try to explain some of it. I don’t fully understand what I’m doing yet myself; for the first few weeks I’ll need to review my ring theory from last year and then work to learn new concepts we didn’t even cover in that class.

Ultimately I’ll be continuing work that Dr. Van Tuyl did on computing spreading and covering numbers for monomial ideals. One of the issues he and his colleagues encountered when they first worked on this problem was a lack of computational power for calculating values for these numbers. Later in the project, I’m going to be writing my own algorithms for calculating these numbers, and I should be able to run them SHARCNET, a network of high performance computers maintained by several academic institutions in Ontario.

I plan to blog about the project as the summer goes on. I start working on May 10, so I probably won’t have much to say on the subject until then. For now I need to focus on finishing the school year!

With the first term nearing its end, here’s a little review of my second year so far.

That is the best way to describe how I spend most of my time now. With three math classes, I spend nine hours a week listening to math lectures. I have three assignments due each week, so I work on those in my time between school and work. Every second week until the middle of November, I went to a practice sessions for math competitions for an hour on Fridays. Even when I’m not doing my own math, I like to help other people with their math. I am living and breathing math.

AND IT’S FRELLING AWESOME.

For those who don’t understand how someone can be so excited about math, the best way I can describe it is like being closer to God. I don’t necessarily believe in God, but I imagine that what I feel when I’m exploring mathematical concepts is the same feeling pious people get when they do whatever it is pious people do to feel closer to God. And math truly is the language of the universe. If God does exist, in one form or another, then understanding math helps one understand the universe and, in a way, get closer to God and creation.

When I first started university, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. I had this deep, dark fear that I’d fail to understand crucial concepts and I‘d never be able to graduate in the math program. Fortunately, so far that isn’t the case. I am learning, and it is a challenge—some of these concepts are really complicated! But I build on what I learned before, and that allows me to understand concepts that a year ago I would have been unable to grasp.

The more I learn, however, the more I‘m able to comprehend just how much more there is I don’t understand yet. I‘m starting to get an idea of where my interests lie, however. I’m really enjoying ring theory—we’ll see if my interest continues next term, when we learn group theory. Abstract algebra appeals to me because it focuses on the reason I love mathematics. Abstract algebra involves constructing and proving the fundamental aspects of math. It’s the fundamentals of the fundamentals. I‘m discovering that I love doing proofs.

I’m getting the sense that most of my peers don’t have the same white-hot passionate love for math that I do. But that’s fine. I’ll show them. I’ll show them all! Muwahahaha! Muwahaha—er … right. Moving on.

When I tell people who know me that I want to teach high school, most of them react with scepticism. Apparently I walk around with the word “Professor” stamped on my forehead. Working for the first time with a new hire at the gallery, I made an allusion to Sisyphus, and my boss said, “Ben’s our resident Einstein.” And the new girl replied, “Yeah, I’m getting that vibe.”

Apparently I give off a vibe now….

I have wanted to teach for as long as I can remember. As I got older, however, the age group I wanted to teach got older as well. So I can’t deny that now that I’m in university, I‘m starting to understand why I would want to teach at a university. My main reason for not wanting to become a professor is that I don’t want to write math papers and do research into theories. I just wanted to do math. Now I‘m realizing that I actually like doing proofs, and it’s scary! :whoa:

Will I stick with my original desire to teach high school? Or will I fulfil everyone else’s predictions? Tune in for the exciting conclusion over the next three years!

Either way, I’m going to be a math hermit for a very, very long time.

I don’t usually rant about work, mostly because it isn’t that bad as jobs go. It has its moments, of course, but what job doesn’t? It is weird, however. I know, I know—every job is weird. But if there were a contest, I’m pretty sure my workplace would be, if not first, top three.

First, the bare essential backstory. We currently have an exhibit up from the Canadian Museum of Nature called “The Gee! in Genomics”. As the name implies, it is a genomics exhibition. The exhibition itself is reminiscient of a science centre; there are lots of buttons to press, videos to watch, matching games—it’s pretty cool. And I’m quite excited about it. Genetics is a science of increasing importance in society. We‘ve mapped the human genome. We’re developing genes that allow us to prevent congenital defects or cure hereditary diseases—but that’s another blog post.

Today, orders came down from on high that we (the front desk staff) were not “enthusiastic” enough. To be fair, this is probably true—at least in my case; in my coworkers‘ defence, they are pretty enthusiastic, or at least amiable. It’s likely that the level of expected “enthusiasm” is higher than even their typical output. However, that raises the question: how does one quantitatively measure enthusiasm anyway?

I’m just not built to work in the customer service industry. I think I would do very well as the stereotypical cafeteria lunch lady (minus the lady part). You know the one I mean: gruff, monosyllabic attitude. She serves you the same unidentifiable meal, day after day. If you ask for pie, she just says, “Eat. Move on.” That’s me. When people come to the gallery, I give them what they want, then hope they go away and stop bugging me. Now, I think that often this is what people want. Let me be clear: I am not rude—at least, I try not to be. I‘m simply brief. I detain people for as long as necessary to communicate the essential rules and information, then I allow them to go. If they want to know something else, they are welcome to ask me questions.

However, I’m getting the sense that more is expected. Apparently I‘m supposed to talk people to death as well as take their money. In addition to being gracious and informative, I’m supposed to extol the virtues of the gallery, the current exhibitions, art in general, and human civilization for the past three hundred years. After politely informing patrons of the exhibition in each gallery and reminding them not to touch the art, I should be thrusting an infinite series of pamphlets and newsletters into their hands.

Maybe some people enjoy being schmoozed. Many probably expect, or at least understand and recognize it (especially if they are schmoozers themselves). But how many really want it? How many just tolerate it because it’s the social norm, not because they’re wired to thrive on it? I recognize that some people genuinely thrive on greasing the wheels on which society turns—all the more power to them.

I have trouble faking enthusiasm. I’m plenty enthusiastic about this current show—ask me how I feel about genomics, and I’ll speak volumes. However, I don’t always volunteer my enthusiasm unless people express interest in knowing. Maybe that makes me a bad front desk attendant. Maybe that makes me defective. But on the flip side, it also means you can be sure I am always sincere. If I am listening, I‘m interested. If I’m talking, I‘m either completely serious or being facetious, but I don’t dissemble.

I wish I knew who did this so I could nominate him or her for a Darwin award. This is what I found when I had to change a light bulb in one of the pot lights above the front desk at work. The light bulbs are standard; the fixture is recessed. So someone came up with this brilliant idea to avoid having a recessed bulb. Take a look at the design! It’s actually two pieces screwed together. And it’s discoloured at the bottom—that can’t be good.

What’s with all the outlets on it? One of my coworkers jokingly suggested it was for plugging in disco balls (the building dates to the seventies). I‘m not an electrician (I shudder to think what an electrician would do upon seeing something like this), but that can’t be to code. I wonder what will happen if a building inspector ever discovers this.

The label is a barcode with 7 digits (phone number?) and “Mexico” on it….

We’ve got this bottle of whiteout in the drawer at the front desk of the art gallery. Regular whiteout or whatnot. I was bored one day and read the tiny printing on the back of the label. After resting my eyes from the strain of trying to read the subatomic type, I considered the implications of this warning: “Contents may catch fire.”

It’s very ambiguous. What do they mean, “contents may catch fire?” So this liquid might just decide to spontaneously combust while it’s sitting in the drawer? Or does it mean that if I expose it to a heat source then the contents might catch fire, but on the other hand, they might not. I half-expected the brand name to be Schrodinger’s Whiteout.

I could expand my reading of the label to create even more interpretations. For instance, prior to the warning about quantum flammability, it says, “Keep out of reach of children”. Let’s concatenate that. “Keep out of reach of children; contents may catch fire.” Let me get this straight: the whiteout company is implying that today’s average child is some sort of pyromaniac who will light whiteout on fire at any chance he or she gets? That’s kind of cynical. Not to mention just mean. Or are they saying that they‘ve engineered the whiteout so that if a child touches it, the whiteout will burst into flames?!

There’s a moral to be learned in all this: be careful how you label things. People might mistake them for soup cans, or thought experiments, or Danish philosophers. When you put something to text, make sure you know what you want to say, and communicate that clearly. Because sometimes a child’s life may depend on it!

Working full-time has finally taken its toll on me. On Friday, my co-worker Danielle and I agreed that we’ve finally snapped. It started with bears….

We get the occasional bear wandering around the campus on which the gallery’s located. Somehow we got on the subject of bears, and Danielle suggested that we trap a bear using stale doughnuts from Robin’s Donuts and then train him to work at the front desk. We‘d dress him in a hat, shades, a vest with tassels, and Lycra pants. h34r: Then we’d sic him on people who touched the artwork. If someone touches the artwork, we would press the button to drop the bear, who would proceed to rampage around the gallery. Sure, all of the art would be destroyed, but that person would never touch the art again! (Probably because they’ve been teared limb from limb…).

Oh, and we‘re going to name him Kingsley Shacklebolt.

And if the above hasn’t yet convinced you I’ve snapped, listen to this: on Sunday I sold a man $100 worth of rocks. Yes indeedy. A dude from Toronto, his wife, and his teenage daughter came to see the gallery. Then he selected a $70 rock and a $30 rock from the gift shop. They weren’t plain, ordinary rocks, of course. They had animals painted on the surface—an owl and a wolf, respectively. However, the punchline goes something like this:

Man: (Looking at $8.95 catalogue his wife wants to get) Mmm … I don’t know if we should get something we’ll look at once and then never open again. It’s not even for an exhibit….

Dude, you’re buying $100 worth of rocks and you’re going to begrudge your wife a $8.95 catalogue?! I wanted to slap him in the face with his own irony. Don’t get me wrong; he was a very nice guy. He certainly had different priorities than most, though.

Anyway, soon school starts. I have conquered Google Calendar and fed it a Sunbird-generated iCal file of my classes. Wednesdays look pretty crowded, but I’m liking Tuesday—one class in the morning and then I‘m done! Friday looks nice too, especially because I don’t work Fridays either.

Hot Fuzz came out on DVD Tuesday. I didn’t see it in theatres, but I enjoyed Shaun of the Dead a lot, so I bought it. Like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz parodies a genre of movies—in this case, cop-themed action movies. It is nonstop hilarious in the way that it’s virtually impossible to discuss specific parts of the movie—it’s all funny. Yet the humour isn’t cheap. There is a compelling plot buried beneath the parody too. Overall, I‘d readily rank it one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

Last night Laura came online and started bragging about this awesome purchase she made at Zellers. When she revealed it was the complete Dilbert television series, I nearly went ballistic. Dilbert!! I used to watch it all the time when Teletoon aired it, but then they stopped, and that was sad. So I went to Zellers today and snagged a copy—$20 for the entire series. Can’t go wrong at that price.

Last night at work I got an odd phone call. There was an old lady who said she was calling from Vancouver. Apparently she had worked here in Thunder Bay as a kindergarten teacher between 1940 and 1975. She made sketches of the children’s heads. And now she was calling here to talk about “art”. It was at this point that I made a “help me” gesture to Danielle. I kept on trying to steer the conversation to see if she had a particular reason, but nope, that was it. I think she was just lonely—at one point she said, “Well, I‘m over 90 now, and I don’t know how much longer I have left … I just want to make a connection.” Nice lady, I‘m sure. I hope that if I live to be 90 I can be that eccentric. But it was the strangest phone call I’ve ever gotten to date (and we get some weird calls.)

This story is an example of why I lack any common sense whatsoever.

Yesterday at work a guy came in and said he was delivering phone books. Okay, no problem, bring them in. Oh wait—they are heavy. Okay, no problem, I’ll help you. Oh wait—there’s a lot of them. Okay, I’ll open up receiving.

Now at this point I’ll admit I thought something was unusual. But I didn’t question anything and proceeded to help these two guys unload 650 telephone books into our receiving area. With a staff of about 12, we really don’t need those many books. It was only after they had left and I went back to the front desk that I realized the order was probably meant to go to the college nearby and we got it by mistake.

After a quick call to the phone company we sorted out the problem, and the books will be picked up today. I feel sorry for those two guys though, because after I help them load up the phone books, they’re going to have to unload them a third time at the college.

This is just another example of how very intelligent people often lack basic common sense (I think it ties in the poor social skills thing too). If I had any common sense I would have stopped them and then asked someone why we were getting 650 books. But did I do that? Nooo. What an idiot!

It does make for a good story though.

For those who observe Daylight Saving Time, we changed back to standard time this morning. I was there when it happened (no secrets of the universe were revealed to me, however, so I want my money back).

This morning at about 11:15 I was getting ready for work when the phone rings. Who is it? It’s my coworker, Danielle, calling from work.

Danielle: Ben … you do know you’re supposed to be working, right?
Me: Yes…
Danielle: Well, you‘re late. It’s after 12.
Me: Um … no it’s not.
Danielle: All the clocks around here say 12:15.
Me: You didn’t set your clocks back?
Danielle: (Calling off to our curator) Glenn did we set our clocks back? (To me) Oh my god…
Me: I’ll see you in about half an hour.

Yes, suffice it to say, we aren’t going to let her live that one down. She spent the rest of the time looking for the manual to reprogram the front desk phone’s clock, though, which is good because it was always ten minutes slow and annoyed us to no end.

Other than that work was pretty slow.

Oh, last night the American Movie Classics channel was playing The Exorcist at 9 followed by The Exorcist II. At 10, guess what Space started playing? That’s right, The Exorcist. To up the creepiness factor to another level, they were showing The Exorcist II right after. Two completely different channels, one number 53 and the other number 52, decide to show the same two movies just hours apart?

Talk about 200 channels and nothin’ to watch.

I got some training today as I started my job. First I had to bike to the Art Gallery, which is located on the college campus. The ride was okay, although I hate crossing the busier streets because I‘m paranoid about being hit by a car. After I got to the gallery, I changed from my shorts into dress pants and a dress shirt (and some dress shoes) to start off at work. I filled out the form and then it was off to the races.

Lots of stuff goes on, and I have varied responsibilities. It was a lot to take in the first day, but I think I’ll like the job. My co-workers are nice and friendly.

There’s a lot of security concerns, it being an art gallery, and particularly this summer because the Norval Morrisseau exhibition is part of the National Collection, in Ottawa, so there is pressure on us from them to make thing everything is secure. Whenever there are visitors inside the galleries, an attendant needs to be in the gallery just to observe and make sure that no one touches the artwork or such. So there’s a lot of standing involved.

At the front desk, attendants have to work the cash register for admission and gift shop and such, as well as answer phone calls. Then at the end of the day we have to do a cash summary from the register and walk around the gallery for an “outgoing check”. All and all, while it takes a lot of energy, I think it’ll be a good job, and I’m glad that I got it.

Not much else to say, eh. Superman Returns comes out tomorrow, although I don’t know when I’ll be able to go see it. GST drops 1% on Saturday, which is both nifty and weird. Canada Day on Saturday too.

There’s such a thing as “too much of the CBC”. That is what I learned today.

I went into work for six hours (because the pay is lucrative but I find it difficult to work for any large amount of time due to the fact I have “school” ). From noon until six today, I mostly sat down in the basement of the Chapples Building and carefully sorted paper from paperclips, the former going into a container to be shredded. This humdrum existence was periodically punctuated by brief trips upstairs to return a full bin and downstairs with an empty bin.

By 5:30 I sort of ran out of steam. I had been listening to CBC Radio One for nearly six full hours by that time. A number of revelations flashed through my mind!

You start to notice how often the host cuts off the guest by interrupting them. I started counting how many times the hosts would say “Okay,” or some other acknowledgement until they had to actually step in and blatantly talk over the guest in order to end the segment. It’s just like listening for people’s intakes of breath before they talk, it’s this bad habit I latch onto after listening to something for any period of time.

Oh, and the hourly world news things? Yeah, they record that. They have about two different recordings for the day that tell the same stories in different orders. After four hours, I realised that they were repeating it word for word. It’s not so much the fact that they record it, I can understand, but I guess no one counts on anyone actually listening to the radio for four hours and finding out that the eagerly-anticipated hourly news turns out to be a rerun from two hours ago.

By 5:30, I was running out of steam. Rex Murphy’s Cross Country Checkup was on. Rex Murphy is cool, not because of who he is, but because the CBC actually pays him money to pontificate with his large vocabulary about any sort of subject. It’s the kind of thing that only the CBC can get away with; those American stations all have their personalities who espouse their points of view, but Rex Murphy seems like the only one who can be blatantly biased and still come off seeming like an intelligent individual.

I think it’s the accent.

Anyway, so I was listening to Cross Country Checkup, where there’s an issue and people from across the country phone in with their take on it. Today was “gun violence amongst inner city youths,” in response to the alarming increase in (you guesed it) gun violence in Toronto. Scarily enough, I was actually tempted to phone in. I was saved from actually touching a phone by the rationalisation that I had nothing to say on the subject. I‘m sure that, had I touched the phone, something disastrous would have happened, like, say a meteor strike that completely wipes out human life on the planet.

The moral of the story: listening to the CBC is good. I like the CBC. I just don’t think I’ll ever try listening to it for six hours straight ever again.