the Wet

Tuesday night I went out to the basketball court and started shooting around. I played until some guys asked me if I wanted to play with them. It was two on two. It was me and the only black guy there versus two asians shorter than me. No problem right? Well it turns out that people in Australia suck at basketball. None of these guys had anything on me. The black guy was the worst basketball player of the group by far. It looked like he had just picked up a basketball a week ago. He couldn't shoot, rebound, or defend. He was pretty much useless. The Asians could shoot a mid-range jumper and the one that the black guy was defending could blow right by him for the lay in but they weren't an outside threat. Anyways we played to 21 but my team ended up winning 26-23 because of win by two. I scored 23 points. It was stupid. It makes me feel like I'm really good at basketball.

Anyways on the way home my stomach started to hurt, alot. I don't know what it was but I was sick pretty much the rest of the night. I did not feel good at all. I came back and watched some tv in pain and went to bed early. The next morning I woke up and felt much better so I went in to work. I started to update spreadsheets when I noticed that some of the responses were missing key demographics information here and there as well as a number of stupid mistakes in data entry. I questioned Max and John about it and they said it wasn't them. I checked with Aly and sure enough it was her. I spent most of the morning fixing her mistakes which really didn't make me too happy. On top of that it seemed like she had forgotten almost everything Max and I had taught her the previous day. I had to stop her many times during an interview because she would read a question incorrectly or try to cut corners by not reading all the answers to particular questions. Needless to say I wasn't very happy with her. After she had done a couple interviews, I went into the database to check up on her data entry and to make sure she was doing it correctly. I was shocked to find that there were no data from her interviews for that day. I asked her what was going on and she said that the survey was probably glitching. I told her probably not and asked her to show me exactly what she was doing when she surveyed someone. Sure enough, she was entering data into the survey preview (which was no where near what Max and I had showed her). This doesn't record any data. By this point I was furious with her. I told her the right way to do it, again, and then told her she'd have to call back all the interviews she had done that morning, admit her mistake to them, and reconduct the surveys. I could tell she wasn't happy because the people she'd be calling would probably be pissed off, but I don't have an ounce of compassion for stupid people. Almost as if to prove my point, halfway through her next call I turned around to check up on her and I had to stop her halfway through the interview. She was reading them THE WRONG SURVEY! She was surveying with the online survey. So she had to re-do it again, I'm sure that person on the other side was livid. I was ready to talk to my sponsors about firing her. Unfortunately, if we fire her we probably won't get another temp in time. I probably spent until 2:00pm fixing her problems. It was an extremely frustrating day.

While all of this was going on inside, the second worst storm in the last 20 years was going on outside. We were getting pounded by a typhoon, which is exceedingly rare for Melbourne. There were dangerous conditions outside with pelleting rain and sustained winds of over 110 kph. Two people died during the storm. A wall fell over and killed an old lady and there was a death at a construction site. I heard some of the trams weren't running because of branches on the track. So I decided to take the bus/train home with Max. However, some of the traffic lights were out, traffic was backed up for miles, and I saw that the tram was running in our area. I decided to risk it on the tram, while Max stayed with the bus. It was a good choice on my part. I got home in about an hour like normal. I called Max and asked him where he was. He said he had just gotten on a tram in Glen Waverly (near the bus station which is like an hour and a half back to the city). Apparently he spent 45 minutes in traffic getting to the train station before finding out that none of the trains were running, then he spent another 45 minutes in traffic getting to the tram stop. So that gave him a commute time of three hours as opposed to one for me.

That evening, Jonathan Barnett, the former Melbourne project center head and our former Theta Chi faculty adviser had arrived in Melbourne on vacation and wanted to take the Theta Chi's on the trip (Me, Putnam, and Dahlberg) out to dinner. The trams were still screwed up from the storm so we walked the 3 km to his apartment. We walked another couple of blocks to Minh Minh, which was Barnett's favorite Asian place. It was Vietnamese/Cambodian/Laotion food and we didn't know how to pronounce it so we let Barnett order for us. The food was really good. My favorite was this duck with lemon which was absolutely delicious. We talked about the house and our advisers and he was appalled at our advisers.

After dinner, we took the tram back and watched Golden Eye in our apartment with the guys and Katie. In typical WPI fashion, we talked about the video game the entire movie. It was pretty sad. I went to bed after the movie and left slightly late for work today. It's rather cold out after the storm. Hopefully the weather will improve as the day goes on.