people

I was just digging through some old post drafts, and found this at MetaFilter:

I just mixed bleach / vinegar / salt / and liquid dish detergent in hopes of creating a super weed killer. I mixed the stuff in a fairly well-ventilated room, and then sprayed it on some weeds outside. Now I just read about chlorine gas resulting from the mixture of bleach and chlorine, and I’m suddenly feeling light-headed (hypochondriac). Am I going to die?

I’m kind of curious if the whole post was meant in jest, or if they were serious. If they were serious… well, they’ve got me puzzled; hopefully not many people think along similar lines as him/her. As others in the MetaFilter thread pointed out, MetaFilter is not 911 or the Poison Control Center. If you’ve done something that you think might be dangerous or fatal, particularly if it involves poisonous gases, probably the last thing you need to be doing is hopping on MetaFilter and writing a post. Okay, well, maybe the last thing would be to stand in the room where you mixed the stuff and inhale deeply, but you get the point.

The post makes me wonder about how often people turn to the internet when perhaps another approach would be more practical or effective. I know I’ve caught myself bending over backwards trying to find a local phone number via Google, when I’ve got a phonebook 20 feet away in a drawer. I’ve also - yes, I’m ashamed! - poked around on amazon.com, trying to find publishing information or some such about a book that is on my shelf upstairs in my room. Admittedly, I usually do that when I’m downstairs, but still, it’d probably be faster to just walk upstairs and yank the book off the shelf. But alas, turning to the internet for information is such a strong habit, it’s hard to break.

I haven’t, however, turned to the internet for emergency help. If my house catches fire, I won’t be posting to MetaFilter, asking what the best course of action is. That’s taking things a bit too far.

Also, a comment from the thread I linked to:

Dear Metafilter, I think I may be dying. Can you tell me if

Heh.

There’s an older fellow in one of my classes this semester, who has indirectly put me in a bit of a bind. I’m stuck considering when one should go from tolerating rudeness and derogatory remarks, to not tolerating it anymore and doing something about the problem. Let me explain:

The class is about world history up to 1600. As to be expected, we started out with a primer on prehistory, and then moved on to Mesopotamia, Egypt, China - the river valley civilizations. From the very start, the man in question has kept taking over the class. He has interrupted the professor and started talking loudly, usually about the Bible’s take on the history. Such-and-such passage says this about the Egyptians; such-and-such passage says that about Babylon. He’s gotten into arguments with the professor about the history, usually because her take on it (or the view presented in our text) did not mesh well with his Biblical view. He’s asked the professor a question about what she was teaching, and then would not allow her to answer; she’d get about 3 words out and he’d drown her out, “No, no, I know that, what I’m asking is…” Often, he has interrupted and just started spouting off something about the Bible, something that wasn’t at all related to what she was lecturing on.

All of this, he’s done practically every class session. Everytime he has done it, it’s clear that the professor is uncomfortable with the situation, as is everyone else in the class; you can feel the tension practically zipping around the room. Thus far no one has said anything; the professor has been able to steer things back onto course (often repeatedly in one session).

Last Tuesday, he hit his high mark (or perhaps it’d be better to call it his low mark). We were working on the chapter about the rise of Islam, and so we were obviously dealing with Mohammed. It was prime territory for the guy to do some Bible-beating, and he pounced on the chance. He started arguing with the professor about the generally kinship-based successions in the caliphates, saying that that went against Jesus’s word, because he had said that only God could select a ruler^[1]. He asked, if Muslims believe in the Christian God, why are they disrespecting Jesus in such a way? The professor patiently explained that, despite believing in the same God, the fact is, Mohammed said that Jesus had some things wrong, and that Mohammed’s way was the right way to do things. After all, Mohammed created Islamd; he didn’t follow Christianity. She was not “standing up” for Islam, simply stating the facts about the history of the religion. The guy’s response was: “Well, huh, Mohammed’ll have something coming to him, then, heh heh. He’ll see.”

Now, am I being overly sensitive about this, or is that remark just completely discriminatory? I’m not Muslim, but if I were, I’d find that pretty insulting. If the guy has his beliefs, that’s fine, but saying something like that in a room full of, more or less, strangers? Not cool. It’s this remark that has me pretty much ready to go to someone who can take action against the guy. I’m not even going to bother attempting to talk to him in private about it, because while I’m not omniscient, I think I have a pretty good idea how productive the conversation would be.

What do you folks think? He’s an irritation at the least, and his “my history via the Bible is better than all of this!” attitude is maddening, but being irritating and having some peculiar ideas about history doesn’t warrant reporting him to someone. Does his remark warrant it? I feel like it does, but like I said, maybe I’m not seeing the situation clearly; I admittedly can’t stand the guy. Then again, I’d say that holds for the majority of my classmates…

(By the way, some of you might be wondering, if this guy is so bad, why hasn’t the professor done something? Good question. Answer: this particular professor is extremely nice, and goes above and beyond her duty to keep the peace. I truly believe that if this guy pulled this stuff in some of my other classes, he would have been booted weeks ago, with or without the knock at Islam.)

1. I’ve no idea if that’s actually in the Bible or not; just writing what this fellow said. I’d say it’s fairly obvious that I wouldn’t trust this guy’s word much. [↩]

In answering the phone at the library reference desk, I’ve noticed a couple funny trends - funny to me, anyway:

• When I answer the phone, I state that it’s the library reference desk, followed by “this is Josh.” This almost invariably triggers the response of “Hi Josh, this is John / Jane Doe” - the folks on the other end of the line almost always give me their full name. It doesn’t seem to matter if their question has anything to do with the circulation of library materials; if it did, having their name might be helpful, but otherwise, it makes no difference whatsoever.
• After giving me their full name, there’s usually a pause, followed by “I have a question.” Well, yes, I would hope so - you called the reference desk, and we typically deal in giving answers. I also get “I need some help” quite a bit. Either one seems weird, though. It’s the reference desk, of course you’re calling us looking for an answer or some other form of help.

What I find a little maddening about this is that even though I’ve noticed these pecularities, I’ve caught myself using the same “oral models”, if you will. I called some place - I don’t remember where, a support line or something similar - and gave my name, followed by “I’ve got a question.” I only realized I’d done it after I’d hung up, at which point I felt like slapping my forehead.

Do any of you folks say similar things when making a call? Have you noticed any other near-pointless expressions that people seem to habitually use?

You know, generally speaking, I like technology. I really do. I’m not sure how I’d get along without a computer and internet access, but I know I wouldn’t like it very much, at least not until I had gone through a long and potentially painful withdrawal period. However, there are some technologies and gadgets that I’m not too fond of. In particular, I think the whole cellphone “thing” has gotten out of hand. Way out of hand.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with the idea of cellphones. They can be quite handy, and I’ll readily admit it. I have a Tracfone, one of those pay-as-you-go cellphones, which I occasionally put minutes on, particularly when we’re going out of town. However, I’m a bit shocked with just how many people have cellphones, and perhaps more importantly, how much the gadgets are stuck to their ears. It doesn’t seem to matter where I go - the university, out to eat, to the grocery store - some people can’t seem to do anything without a cellphone glued to the side of their head.

I can understand businessmen and women needing to be available at any time; say, CEOs and other “important” folk. I’m sure there are plenty of other professions that require such constant availability, too. But I refuse to believe, for example, that half of my fellow university students are secret millionaires who must monitor their business around the clock, regardless of what they’re doing at the time. They take calls during class, they text message in class. They’re on the phone (or texting) while walking to and from class. They’re on the phone (or, amazingly, texting!) while driving. A few of them have moved up to not even needing to hold their phones; they have those little Bluetooth-powered earphones, so they can take that extremely important phonecall at a moment’s notice. After all, who knows when you’ll need to take a call and not have time to pull the phone out of its holder? And anyway, having a Bluetooth earphone latched onto your ear all day, whether you’re using it or not, holds a message: look at me, please^[1]!

To all of that, I have to ask: don’t these people get tired of being available around the clock? Don’t they get to the point where they just want to turn the little handheld slavemaster off, and go do something in peace and quiet? Do they ever think that maybe they should turn the phone off and pay attention to the human beings all around them? I’ll often walk by the university cafeteria and take a peak in, and while it isn’t always the case, quite often I’ve seen a peculiar sight: a cafeteria full of people, most of them sitting by themselves at their table, all of them eating and talking on a cellphone. All together in the same room, but essentially alone besides the person that’s on the other end of the phone. Strange.

As I said, I don’t have a problem with cellphones per se. Rather, I have a bit of a problem with how people use them. At times, it looks as if the people are being used by the cellphones instead of the other way around. In many situations in which face-to-face interactions should take precedence over a (usually relatively unimportant) phonecall, the reality is, the phonecall wins almost everytime. I wrote before about one of my classmates texting throughout a class, and unfortunately, that and taking phonecalls mid-lecture are extremely common. What is it these people are talking about that it can’t wait until a 50 minute class is over?

I suppose that, if you get right down to it, I just wish that people would use common sense with the things, and show a little more respect for other people. Being in mid-conversation with someone and them taking a phonecall to talk about last night’s football game or something similar… well, to me, there’s something wrong with that. There’s something wrong with so many university students thinking it’s perfectly normal to interrupt a class repeatedly so they can take that call about tonight’s forthcoming drinking binge.

For those who are expecting important phonecalls, fine; leave them on, but set them to vibrate^[2], please. For those who aren’t expecting any important phonecalls - their wife isn’t pregnant and due to give birth at any moment, their father isn’t in the hospital, they’re not waiting on that billion dollar contract to be finalized - I wish they’d consider turning the ringing taskmaster off for a while. It wouldn’t hurt them to go through a class without texting or to have a phoneless meal with their spouse. It really wouldn’t. Those of us around them would appreciate it; at least I would, anyway!

Some people need to remember that they own the phones. Somewhere along the line, the relationship seems to have been turned on its head.

1. If you’re one of the folks who uses the Bluetooth headsets, my apologies - but I really do think they look absurd, particularly when they’re not in use. They make me feel like I’ve fallen into a science fiction movie - which, I suppose, could be interesting, but with fewer Bluetooth headsets and more Wookies. [↩]
2. I commend those who set their phones to vibrate when they’re going to be doing something that they don’t want to interrupt. However, it seems to be a common thing to set the phone to vibrate, and then set it on the table / desk they’re at. As one of my professors commented at the beginning of the spring semester, this is a bad idea; a vibrating phone on a hard surface sounds a bit like machine gun fire. [↩]

There are so many of them, if the activity weren’t so common, I’d be scared. I’m talking about people “following” me on Twitter.

I’ve just logged in and posted a twitter (I can’t bring myself to call them tweets), the first since mid-November. And yet since then, I’ve still had 6 or 7 people I don’t know start following me. What’s the deal? I don’t have a problem with it - if I did, I wouldn’t have a Twitter account. But I don’t understand it, either. On Twitter, I follow people that I know from other networks (mostly 9rules), and I don’t feel a great urge to follow hundreds of random people that I’ve never spoken to or emailed before. Do these people who are following me (and hundreds of other people - I’ve looked!) really care about what I post to Twitter? Or is it just a collection game?

I feel like I’m just an item on their page, as if they’re collecting bottle caps or stamps. I felt the same way on MySpace (which I no longer use) and Facebook (which I log into about once a month). It seems that the collecting of friends and faces is more important than actually communicating and forming relationships with the people.