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		<header>
			<h1>Nine days</h1>
			<p>Day 00623: Saturday, 2016 November 19</p>
		</header>
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2016/11/19.jpg" alt="Chefs at a Mongolian grill" class="weblog-header-image" width="811" height="480" />
<p>
	<strong>Current countdown:</strong> 9 days to find a place to live
</p>
<h2 id="general">General news</h2>
<p>
	My SafeLink telephone arrived in the mail today.
	It&apos;s a lightweight, small device; an actual telephone, not a pocket computer.
	Sure enough, it was a <abbr title="Global System for Mobile Communications">GSM</abbr> device as expected.
	My initial plan had been to try to use the <abbr title="subscriber identity module">SIM</abbr> card in my Replicant device, but after thinking about it over the past several days, I&apos;ve decided not to do that.
	I&apos;ll use the thing as it was intended to be used.
	Reading the instructions on it, it told me to call <a href="tel:+18662728101">some number</a> to activate the service.
	What the heck? I mean, I get that they can assume that you have telephone service because they&apos;re the ones providing it.
	Most companies should assume this, but in some cases (read: when you&apos;re subscribed to a telephone plan, not a data plan), your carrier can semi-reasonably demand that you call them.
	But before you activate the device, they can&apos;t assume that! With my T-Mobile telephone service gone now, I can&apos;t make any calls to anyone, even if I did actually want to.
	Reading a sticker inside the box, separate from the instruction sheet that I read first, showed me that they weren&apos;t being as unreasonable as I&apos;d initially thought though.
	They provided twenty minutes worth of service to use just for this activation process.
	Honestly, it really shouldn&apos;t take a full twenty minutes, so everything was fine.
	However, the instructions also say that if for some reason, you&apos;re unable to make or receive calls, you should call <a href="tel:+18003781684">some other number</a>.
	What part of &quot;unable to make or receive calls&quot; involves being able to make a call? I&apos;m really hoping not to run into technical difficulties with this thing, as it looks like getting them dealt with won&apos;t be an easy task.
	It also looks like I&apos;m required to place on call per month to keep the service active.
	I suppose I&apos;ll just call <a href="tel:611;phone-context=+1">611</a> each month if I don&apos;t have anyone else to call, which will be exceedingly likely, as the instructions say that calls to that number don&apos;t count against your minutes.
	I only need this line of service for dealing with a select few people that fall into both the categories of demanding contact via telephone and being people that cannot be told not to reach me if they refuse use something more reasonable such as email.
</p>
<p>
	I&apos;ve added my telephone number to my contact page on this website.
	I really hope that people will use email instead, but if some reason you need to reach me via telephone, you can do that.
	Keep in mind that I&apos;m much more likely to respond to emails than calls though.
</p>
<p>
	My mother wanted to spend time with me, so we went out to a Mongolian grill to eat.
	I&apos;ve never found this sort of food to be appetizing.
	I&apos;m not sure if it&apos;s because of past experience, or if I just judged it before actually eating any.
	Today though, the food there was great! Maybe it was the fact that I had them leave out the teriyaki sauce.
	I&apos;m not much of a teriyaki fan.
	Or maybe it was the fact that this time, I&apos;m vegan, so I left out any sort of meat whatsoever.
	Or maybe, it was always actually great food.
	After that, we went through a warehouse store.
	I&apos;m not sure what we were looking for, but we bought a few snacks for when we visit relatives in the coming week.
</p>
<p>
	As we left the store, my mother wanted to know if I wanted to go play bingo with them in another city.
	I&apos;m on standby today at work, so I have to be in town in case I&apos;m needed.
	More to the point though, I think that my mother thinks that my days off from work are actual days off from needing to do anything.
	My days off are actually my study days.
	These are the days in which I actually have the time and energy to sit down and do my homework.
	I can&apos;t be wasting the whole day on games.
	Furthermore, it sounds the bingo prizes are dead birds.
	I don&apos;t want anything to do with winning dead birds!
</p>
<p>
	My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
</p>
<h2 id="university">University life</h2>
<p>
	Frustratingly, my essay topic for this week is about a chapter in our textbook that doesn&apos;t exist.
	Up until today, I thought that the assignment had just been put together with bad data.
	The title of the section wasn&apos;t present in the textbook, so perhaps my school had gotten the title wrong, for example.
	However, searching through my textbook, the subject of that section doesn&apos;t even come up.
	There&apos;s a company, the SAS Institute, and I&apos;m to read the section on how they invest in their employees.
	This company is only mentioned twice in the entire textbook (Isn&apos;t {control} + &quot;f&quot; nice?), and neither time is even in the right context.
	I did a Web search for the title of the section to see what I could find, and the top search result seems to be exactly the missing section that I need.
	As best I can tell, this section is from a derivative version of the book made possible by the original book&apos;s <abbr title="Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike">CC BY-NC-SA</abbr> license.
	Additionally, the authors of this section have requested that attribution to them be removed, so I don&apos;t even know who wrote it.
	Normally, it wouldn&apos;t even matter who wrote it, but I&apos;m supposed to use the stupid <abbr title="American Psychological Association">APA</abbr> citation format, which demands that I provide that information.
	This is just one more flaw with the <abbr title="American Psychological Association">APA</abbr> citation format.
	I guess that I&apos;ll just say that the author&apos;s name is &quot;[Authors removed at request of original publisher]&quot;.
	The worst part of this though is that it means that the version of the textbook that the school instructed us to use is <strong>*not*</strong> the version that the assignments are based on.
	I can&apos;t even be sure that this new textbook that I found covers everything that we&apos;re actually expected to learn, only that it has what I need <strong>*this*</strong> time.
	The essay assignment also says to consider the &quot;Factors That Have the Strongest Influence over Work Behaviors&quot; from section 2.6, but that section doesn&apos;t exist in out textbook! Instead, that information is in section 5.
	Likewise, this information isn&apos;t in section 2.6 of the new textbook that I found, though I didn&apos;t bother to scan the whole book to find where it might be instead.
</p>
<p>
	I finished the rest of my reading assignment for the week, and too the ungraded quiz on it.
	I&apos;ve got to say, my ten-minute reading sessions at work (on my breaks) have been a big help this week.
	Knowing that I only have to make it for ten minutes at a time makes it much less boring, so I can get through it much easier.
	Even today, when I had a much longer reading session, my previous reading sessions added up and had made sure that I had less to read today.
	I think that I can make it through the rest of the term without too many problems.
</p>
<p>
	I&apos;ve started work on my <a href="/en/coursework/BUS1101/Behavior_management_at_the_SAS_Institute.xhtml">essay</a> for the week, though it&apos;s far from finished.
	I also wrote up the first of my four discussion posts for the week:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
	My current job isn&apos;t anything special.
	I work part-time at a fast-food pizza joint.
	Obviously, this has nothing to do with my future aspirations.
	Of the big five personality traits, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, I think that they value conscientiousness the most.
	We do all of the same activities day in and day out, with no room for creativity or new ideas, so openness isn&apos;t needed there.
	Extroversion is useful when running one of the tills, but (not counting when people cover each other&apos;s breaks) only four of us even go near the till or any customers in a given day.
	Some of us <strong>*never*</strong> work the tills.
	Agreeableness is nice, and it makes employee relations more pleasant, but it doesn&apos;t get the job done.
	Likewise, my employer isn&apos;t really trying to keep turnover rates down, so employee relations aren&apos;t really focused on.
	Obviously, neuroticism isn&apos;t a valuable trait, so that leaves conscientiousness.
	We are show up on time, we perform the tasks asked of us, and we put care into our work.
	That&apos;s all that they really expect of us.
</p>
<p>
	In another job, in an actual career, conscientiousness would likewise be important.
	When I finish school, I&apos;d like to find a career as a network administrator.
	The job will require that I be punctual and especially that I pay attention to detail.
	Having a high level of conscientiousness will be very important in successfully keeping the network functioning.
	Many problems can be avoided by setting things up correctly the first time, but when inevitable mistakes happen and when unavoidable issues crop up, starting to work on the fix for them right away will be vital for getting the network functioning optimally again and minimizing the inconveniences and productivity loss that results.
</p>
</blockquote>
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