Feel good story of the day

A week ago, I found a cell phone on the bus and turned it into the lost and food. Yesterday, same route, same driver, as I got on, she told me that the guy who just got off the bus was the one who owned the phone. A transit employee who was happy to have his phone back. It feels good to have closure on these things.

Things we’re supposed to remember

I’ve been helping my sister with her calculus a bit lately. It has me wondering about something. We live in a society where almost every high school graduate has a solid understanding of algebra and almost every baby boomer who doesn’t work in a math intensive field has trouble with basic algebra. At the same time, we’re expected to remember every single language we were ever taught and when we don’t, it’s apparently a flaw in ourselves for not maintaining that level of understanding. Fact of life, people forget things. Things that seem most likely to be forgotten tend to be infrequently used and taught in a disciplinarian style where the end individual has little interest in the subject.
Thus far, the average person I’ve met isn’t able to calculate how much their pay cheque changes by if they were to work an hour of overtime. For me, that happens to be $15.7, give or take about a quarter. Math and finances are two things that interest me, so I happen to know this stuff. I know little to nothing about things I happen to have little to no interest in, like pop culture or languages that I don’t speak every day.

Mess is over, for another year at least

I work in a factory. It’s a place that’s kind of away from the public eye, so we get a lot of new immigrants and many of them aren’t too confident in their english skills. It’s not too bad since most of the things we tend to say are rather simplistic, though every once in a while I run into a situation that I just don’t know how to approach. We had one person writing “Fed” instead of “Feb” on our document dates. Yes, someone should do something about it, but that’s one that I’m not touching. At the end of the month, I saw a document with numbered dates, so hopefully we won’t run into this again next year. It’s kind of mean that nobody has told him about it yet. Having everyone kind of snicker behind his back is far worse in the long run than someone giving him a gentle nudge and saying that ‘b’s go in the other direction. I don’t really know him that well, but if I had to guess, I’d say this guy has been in the country for over a year already. Well, if I see this happening again next year, I’m going to ask a supervisor to do something. This is just done for now.
Just to clarify, nothing against immigrants here, but I do look down at management for this. I see supervisors run around checking things out all the time and well, if this is the standard they want to set, than I’ll let them be content with what they have.