Wednesday, October 08, 2008

It ain't fiction just a natural fact

I haven't been feeling strongly about anything in particular lately so I'll just tell you stories from work.

One thing about my job is that I have to do a full week of schooling every couple of months. This semester I have the highest grade in the class, which I say in a very egotistical way because it's impressive when you know I'm competing against a bunch of newby construction workers.

I actually learn a lot in the classes but the hardest material reduces to basic algebra. We were getting ready for a test with some practice questions. There is a cool kid in the class who gave up a lucrative career as the guitarist for two separate bands so he could settle down and get married. We use "Ohm's Law" a lot and for some reason the guitarist likes to make up catchy words to remember different variations of these formulas. It turns out to be more work because you end up memorizing the formulas AND the goofy words.

I told him, "I'm trying to figure out the voltage drop to run this heater... what's that formula to get the resistance?"

He said, "That's Red-P." Which means Resistance = E squared divided by Power (where E is voltage) to you and I.

A few minutes later another kid was working on the same problem and he asked me, "How do I get the resistance in this part of the problem?"

I told him, "That's where you need Red-P."

He asked, "What the hell is Red-P...?"

Without thinking, I jokingly said, "Every month a girl has a special visitor..."

And that was the exact moment the teacher walked into the room. He heard me and seemed befuddled, "You guys are supposed to be studying! What are you talking about?"

And then without waiting for an answer he said, "Hey, my friend is in med-school and she sent me a bunch of cadaver pictures... do you guys want to look that them?"

So he did a lackluster slideshow of cadaver pictures while we were studying and when he was done, he asked, "Is everyone okay... that didn't bother any of you did it?"

I said, "No. Those weren't very impressive and I don't usually get grossed out anyway. Maybe every once in a while if I see eyeball surgery on TV where the patient is awake and doctors are slicing his eyeball with a scalpel and it starts to bleed and stuff. That kind of grosses me out."

And he says, "Hey! Have I told you guys about my cornea transplants?"

I protested, "I said that I DON'T like eyeball surgery."

But he spent the next half hour giving the excrutiating details of his surgery like I hadn't said anything. If you can avoid getting a corneal transplant, I would recommend that you not go through with it. The story started with the nurse taking him to a strange room in the basement of the hospital where the door was locked from the outside. She told him she needed to give him a shot in the eye and that it was okay to scream but to try and keep his eye still. He said it felt like acid in his eye and he fell on the floor and screamed. Then she told him they needed to do that four times.

The school also likes to make a lot of money selling us lots of books about the same subject. We were studying the structure of an atom and, in regard to protons and electrons, one book said that like charges attract eachother and the other book said that like charges repel eachother. One of the kids brought this up to the teacher for discussion and I said, "If Paula Abduls lyrics are accurate then opposites attract."

I hope somebody reading this thinks that was funny because none of the burly construction dudes in my class did. Except one guy, and he thought it was so funny that he told me I got 12 bonus points for the day. But I don't know what the bonus points are for.

2 comments:

Native Minnow said...

I take one step forward and two steps back . . .

PsychDoctor said...

I was laughing...