Tag Archives: ignorance

No Child Left Behind?

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Sure, they can pass tests. But can they tell time?

I had a heavy shock today in the Safeway Supermarket in Wickenburg, AZ when I witnessed the following exchange between a cashier/manager and the teenage clerk who was bagging groceries at her register.

Girl: Do I get a break today?

Cashier (after studying a break sheet): Yes. You have lunch at 3 o’clock.

Girl: What time is it now?

Cashier (pointing to the clock on the wall): Look at the clock.

Girl (laughing): I can’t tell time on that.

I looked at the clock. It was a typical wall clock — you know, the round kind with two hands and a bunch of numbers. It read 1:35 PM.

Me (to the girl): You can’t tell time on a regular clock?

Girl (still laughing): No.

Teenage Guy behind me on line: I can’t either.

Me (to the girl): And you think that’s funny? What school did you go to?

Girl (still laughing but now moved to the end of the next register; I think I was scaring her): Wickenburg.

We’ll cut the conversation here, mostly because I became outraged and had to be calmed by the cashier, who is about my age. I reminded her that I learned how to tell time when I was 5 and I’m sure she was about the same age.

The point of all this is the fact that today’s kids apparently lack basic skills that they need to get by in life. How can an 18-year-old girl not know how to tell time on a standard analog clock? What else does she not know how to do? Read? Write in full sentences? Spell the words that might appear on a job application?

How the hell does she expect to get anywhere in life? Or is her highest aspiration to be a bagger in a grocery store? No offense to folks with challenged kids, but mentally retarded people can do that.

Yet apparently, this kid can pass the tests she needs to graduate high school.

No child left behind? Sure.

You Can’t Fix Stupid

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Quote of the day.

If you follow this blog, you may have read about my Quincy Golf Course RV Park Internet woes. I thought I had them licked before I went away to Pateros on June 26, but when I returned on July 7, it was down again.

Recap

Let me review the situation:

  • The Internet people put an antenna on the roof of the Golf Course Pro Shop building.
  • The antenna points to another antenna about a half mile away to pick up an Internet signal.
  • The Internet people put a WiFi router in the Pro Shop and connected it to the antenna.
  • The WiFi setup operates at normal WiFi frequencies.
  • The Pro Shop has a Toro irrigation system which uses an antenna on the building to turn various sprinklers on or off based on a computer schedule and manual inputs on a radio.
  • The Toro system operates on a completely different frequency in a different range.
  • The irrigation guy is convinced that the Internet system conflicts with the irrigation system.
  • The Internet people moved the antenna and ran extensive tests with the irrigation guy to assure that his system continued to work. There was no conflict at that time or any other time that the Internet people were here.

That’s where things were on June 26 when I left town for 10 days. When I got back, the Internet was disconnected and the router was missing — although all the other equipment was in place and even powered up.

Evidently, while I was gone, the irrigation system failed again. Coincidentally, there was also a power failure here — I know this because my microwave’s clock was reset. But the irrigation guy — who I think I’m going to rechristen the irritation guy — is certain that the failure is due to the Internet setup. And now he’s convinced management.

So they won’t let me reconnect the system.

So I don’t have full-time Internet anymore. Again.

And I’m out the $70 I paid for two months of Internet service.

And I’m working on a book for a software product that attempts to connect to the Internet every third time I click a button or choose a menu command.

Stupid is as Stupid Does

I’ve spoken to numerous people about this situation. People who know more about the technical aspects of wireless operations than I ever will. All have agreed that there should not be a conflict.

I talked directly to Toro technical support. They told me there should not be a conflict.

During the troubleshooting process, I disconnected the entire Internet system and asked the irritation guy to test it. He claimed it wouldn’t work. When I pointed out that nothing was connected, he admitted that his radio transmitter battery was low and that could have caused the problem.

Every single time the Internet people were here to test the system with the irritation guy, the irrigation system worked flawlessly.

Yet the first time it doesn’t work properly, the irritation guy blames the Internet and disconnects part of the system. He gets it to work and assumes that the problem is the Internet — not whatever else he did to get it to work.

When I recited these details to my editor, Megg, she gave me a quote from her husband: “You can’t fix stupid.” I had to write it down. It fits this situation perfectly.

Stupid is not a word I use lightly. I prefer the word ignorant, which has a very different meaning. Ignorant means uninformed. Or, more specifically, from the New Oxford American Dictionary in the Dictionary application in Mac OS X:

lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated

I wanted to think that the irritation guy was just ignorant. He’s not technically savvy. Heck, he had to have his daughter come out and help him disconnect an Ethernet cable from a computer! All he knows about the irrigation computer is what the setup guy told him. He doesn’t touch it without assistance from the local support person. So, obviously he’s not informed about how computers work.

But when several people go through the exercise of testing the system with him to prove that it works and multiple people explain that the two systems are on different frequency ranges so there shouldn’t be any conflict and he still refuses to believe, I have to start applying the stupid label to him.

And you can’t fix stupid.

It’s Not Just Sand

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I have to explain to passengers that the desert is more than sand dunes.

I had some passengers on a helicopter flight a few weeks back who were just visiting the Phoenix area from somewhere back east. At sometime during the flight, they told me they were hoping to see the real desert.

My DesertI was confused. Wickenburg sits in the Sonoran desert. That’s the desert with the big saguaro cacti all over the place. It rains, on average, less than 8 inches a year. The desert can’t get any more real than that.

My passenger clarified. “Well, where’s the sand?”

The sand, unfortunately, is all over the place. In washes, in my front yard, in my shoes and cars, and in my hair and eyes during a dust storm. Sand (and dust) is a part of life here.

But not the kind of sand my passenger was thinking about. He was thinking of sand dunes. You know. Like the kind in movies that take place in the Sahara desert.

I began to understand. His mental picture of the desert included the rolling sand dunes from the movies. The same sand dunes that had hazards like quicksand and oasises with palm trees and ponds of water.

I explained that there were sand dunes in the southwest desert, but they were only part of the desert landscape — not the whole thing. I told him about the big sand dunes west of Yuma on I-8, and the small sand dunes west of Blythe off of I-10 (I’m not even sure if you can see those from the road, but I see them from the helicopter when I fly that way), and the medium sized sand dunes in Death Valley.

Then I put on my tour conductor voice and gave him a summary description of the Sonoran desert landscape, including information about its cacti, trees, animal life, and other features.

Of course, all this has me wondering how many people think the desert is just a big sand dune.

Monument ValleyOne of the things I love about the desert is its diversity. There are so many kinds of desert, each with their own little ecosystem. Drive 50 or 100 miles in any direction and you’re likely to be in a whole different kind of desert. For example, if you drive up route 93 from Wickenburg, you’ll enter another kind of desert where there are no saguaro cacti, but plenty of Joshua trees. Drive up to Monument Valley and you’ll see the layers of underlying rock exposed in magnificent formations, with scrubby trees and bushes hanging on for life in the fine red sand.

Just don’t go down to Phoenix. There isn’t much of the desert left down there, with all the asphalt, golf courses, non-native plants (like palm trees, for heaven’s sake!), and irrigation.

RSS Summaries

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A reader chastises me.

The other day, while writing about the Reading Options in WordPress, I decided to experiment with this blog. I togged the settings so only summaries of my entries would be sent to people accessing with RSS readers.

Understand that I don’t use an RSS reader. I surf the old fashioned way, with a Web browser. I don’t surf that often and I don’t follow any one particular blog or site. So it’s never been an issue for me.

But for the book, I had to understand what this WordPress feature did. So I toggled it to the Summaries setting, downloaded a feed reader, and looked at the result. What I saw was a list of 10 or so posts in a window. I’d click a post title and the beginning of the post would appear in a window pane beneath the list. There was a link at the end indicating that there was more; clicking the link brought me to my Web site.

This seemed a logical way to release content via RSS. After all, didn’t I want visitors to come to the site where they could read not just the articles but the comments? And see all the pictures that came with the piece?

Dori of Wise Women didn’t think so. She commented on my “Stand Up for Your Principles” piece to stand up for her principles: that RSS feeds for blogs should include the entire content.

Whew! No problem. This morning, I remembered what I did to create the summaries (I did have to remember something I learned about 2 whole days ago!) and toggled the option back to its original settings. I just checked it with my feed reader and it’s working fine.

But this makes me curious. I’d like to know more from the folks who use an RSS feed reader to follow this blog. Here are a few questions; I’d appreciate it if you’d take the time to answer a few of them in the Comments for this post.

  • How often do you check the site? Regularly? (If so, I’m flattered to be on your list!)
  • Why do you prefer a news reader to a Web browser?
  • Does your news reader display formatted text and graphics?
  • Which reader do you use? On what computer platform?
  • Would you like to share any advice for people considering using a reader or for bloggers like me who aren’t fully aware of the benefits?

Although I’m a technical person and write about computer technology for a living, I made a decision long ago to concentrate on only those technologies that I use or write about. There’s just too much out there to learn it all — and still have a life that doesn’t revolve around a computer! As a result, my knowledge of computer technology is spotty, with expertise on certain topics balanced by sheer ignorance of others. (Ignorance is bliss, they say.)

Perhaps its time to give the RSS feed reader topic a bit more attention. What do you think?

PostScript: I just used my RSS reader to check out the other blogs that were included in it. It appears that none of them include the full text of the article. What’s going on here? Perhaps that’s why I discarded the idea of using a reader when I first tried it about two years ago? Because you had to go to the Web site anyway to read the article? It seems that, in many instances, the reader adds an extra step to following blogs. If you’re commenting on this piece, please comment on that, too.