Besides being so totally distracted by Statistics homework I have been without internet access at home for 36 hours. Completely throwing me off. Although I have ye olde crackberry, from which this blog post is being crafted, I am out of sync with my regular internet activities. Plus, I've had to go into San Francisco to do my homework, at school!
A note about my schoolmates. Using the computer lab has turned into a cultural experience. Golden Gate University has many international students and the lab offers a cross section of the UN. I've never seen so many Chinese websites being accessed in one room.
A super strange thing happened today in the lab. There were only four of us there. One was an Asian woman who kept walking over to an Asian man at his computer and asking him something. Both of them seemed older than most international students and I started to wonder if perhaps they were lab crashers. The Asian man started to scream and at the Asian woman and he eventually stormed out of the room. She then went up to another man (not Asian) and asked him something. He didn't scream but he did pretty much ignore her. Uh oh, I thought, she's coming to me next. I didn't know what to expect but I figured I would give her a chance.
She couldn't speak a word of English but through her gesturing I figured out that she needed numbers on her pages. She kept showing me her printouts, which were all in Chinese, and pointing at the page number at the bottom of the first page, 38. That happens to be a combination of my two favorite numbers (as they are my birthday) so I felt compelled to help. I setup the page numbering and she was in business.
I thought maybe she would be thankful, especially after the first man screamed at her, but she really didn't respond to my help. Perhaps it was a culture clash - me expecting gratitude and her expecting...I'm not sure what.
I can tell that pursuing this degree at GGU is going to expose me to some interesting learning both I the classroom and beyond.
