Saturday, September 02, 2006
Last night one person (a new hire) did not appear for work, another person requested off but did not provide a substitute, and after nine o'clock the store had no cook. I closed with only two people (three would have been feasible, four or five optimal) and did not arrive back at the Lauree Lair until three-thirty this morning. My managers have been slow to hire the right people (e.g. the student who politely volunteered as an evening weekend cook and who happens to have long, green hair) and slow to fire people like the little girl on my shift who didn't fulfill her responsibility of finding a replacement, or the girl who called in this afternoon claiming she was sick (background: this evening is the first football game of the season, and last semester she happened to be ill or otherwise preoccuppied during several game-day shifts). I am deeply saddened indeed to have forty hours of my life per week consumed with such mundane nonsense.
Classwise I am satisfied. Greek will be "easiest"; it comes much more quickly than Latin, for whatever reason. Dr. Lavigne said Greek is more intuitive. But I do want to significantly improve my Latin, and with Sundays entirely free I am determined to study through the afternoon and evening as I complete laundry. Right now it takes a couple of hours to translate a few lines of text, because I keep having to look up every other word. I should recognize things more readily after a few weeks of practice.
Last semester the German readings class I took focused on short stories of the post-World War II period. This semester I have a different professor (Dr. Borst, the undergraduate advisor) who decided, after popular demand, to structure her readings course around practical translations (coming from the Internet, newspapers, magazines, television, et cetera). The book is written in English and Dr. Borst gives most of the instructions in English, which suits me fine, because English is the language I speak (sort of- I've noticed I almost never pronounce the "h" in "have"). I miss reading literature, but this course will definitely be useful and slightly less demanding on a day-to-day basis.
Dr. Reed's seminar on the sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome only requires a course-long research paper with, it would seem, less stipulations than the one I had to compose last semester. This class requires no project model (I spent many days on the aqueduct for the ancient technology class last year) and no in-class presentation (I spent several days on a suitable Power Point presentation last semester). A little twelve-page paper about the art of period "x" to period "y" I can do. Tomorrow or Labor Day I need to read a couple of chapters from the book, and over the week I'll review the syllabus to dibs a topic. Viel Spaß.
End report.
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 4:32 PM]