pilfered_words

If you follow figure skating at all, you may know that Thanksgiving weekend was the weekend of Skate America, the last of the Grand Prix series of competitions (besides the Final, which is next week).

 

One of the things that happened at Skate America was that the Israeli skater Daniel Samohin fell, dislocated his shoulder, and had to withdraw. Not unprecedented, but a shame, he’s a good skater, and attractive to look at, though I must admit to being biased in the favor of a fellow Russian-American-Jew. 

 

Unfortunately for me, at the time that he fell, I was watching the competition with a bunch of teenagers. “How does he look so pretty when he’s crying?!” said one fifteen-year-old.

 

“That’s exactly when-” 

 

-and then my brain-to-mouth filter abruptly re-engaged. 

 

And then they harassed me until I finished the sentence.

 

#'someone has a kink' they said#'you have no idea'#I thought

Oh man, this one time, my friend was like, ‘oh hey, there are some naked wires sticking out of the wall! That is probably not how things should be!” And instead of leaving the wires alone like a normal person, and asking the landlord to do something about it, he decided this was so Not Safe that he needed to do something right away. Even though he’d been living in that apartment for like a year and a half by that point, and nothing had happened.

 

So he took a paperclip, and very carefully, without actually touching anything, dropped it across the wires to close the circuit. The way he explained his logic at the time was, “either they aren’t live wires, and then it’s fine, or they are, and then this will just cause a short circuit and we’ll hit the circuit breakers, and then everything will be fine.”

 

Three months and five electrician visits later, they were pretty sure they had caught the last of the pieces burned, fused, or otherwise damaged by that short circuit. Probably.

 

My friend, incidentally, has a PhD in math from MIT, which goes to show you that fancy degrees don’t actually guarantee common sense.

Today at work, I filed approximately 20 bugs. Tomorrow, if all goes well, I’ll file 5 more. 

 

1) Today I signed the offer for an real, actual full time position at my company. With a real, actual salary. Not a large salary, mind you, but calculated in K per year, not $ per hour. With benefits, paid time off, and so on. As of Monday, I will be officially a Junior QA Engineer.

 

2) I signed up to beta for Yuletide! That should, in theory, go better than my abortive attempt at writing for Yuletide four years ago. I’m a lot better at editing than creating. (See also: QA Engineer.)

 

3) I spent what felt like about half of today explaining to people that the reason for the video and audio service in our “virtual classroom environment” being down was the huge DDOS attack, and that there was nothing we could do about it. And our software engineer left halfway through the day and abandoned me to deal with it alone.

 

Whenever I have slept under a top sheet, by the end of the night, the top sheet was crumpled up in a corner of the bed and I was just under the comforter directly. 

 

I grew up with duvet covers, because Russian, but I became aware at a very early age that American people do it WRONG. In fact, until recently, I didn’t know how to say “duvet cover” in English! I thought it wasn’t a thing!

 

I do agree that on hot nights, top sheets are better, but that in no way necessitates using them the rest of the time! And I have a hard time sleeping if it’s hot anyway, so usually I turn the air conditioner up and that problem goes away.