#la lesson

[pennpinky]

April 25th, 2016

Long story short… I did horribly. Just horribly. Not that it’s a surprise. Public speaking was never my strong suit. I was just a bundle of nerves, fidgeting in my seat, waiting for all of it to be over. I just couldn’t get rid of this feeling of anxiousness. It was there when I left home, it was there when I got to the school, when I met Mrs. Agnew, the person observing me, it was there even way…

View On WordPress

[pennpinky]

March 21, 2016

Every class on Monday starts out with a morning meeting where every students sits around in a circle and basically introduces themselves or each other. Today they said each other’s names out loud to the tune of the Adam’s Family. After that, they shared what they did over the weekend, and then played a game (heads or tails). Then they continued with math and then worked on “The Best Part of Me”…

View On WordPress

[gertier-blog]

La Lesson #10: Internet

When I first arrived, I was without internet at home. My little laptop didn't see any wireless signal, which made it kind of hard to work on stuff from home.

My grandmother has a router hooked up to her phone line, giving her some kind of crazy, glorified, wireless dial-up internet so she can download games to her kindle. However, my computer didn’t seem to recognize her router at all.

Fortunately, after a phone call with my brilliant father, we managed to get it working for me, and once again, I was enthusiastically internet creeping on all my far away friends.

Though I could easily see Facebook, and watch a 10 second video of my friend’s baby laughing, that was about the maximum level of internet achievement  I could get. The dial up wireless, is slow, painfully so sometimes. But you learn to work with it.

So I did my best to limit my internet time to after my grandmother had gone to bed, usually around 9:30, when I knew my computer would not have to fight the kindle for bandwidth.

But last night, I discovered something even more fun about our house internet….. When the phone rings, the internet stops.

Oh yeah, you read that right. It stops. In fact, it cuts off so completely that the wireless signal doesn’t show at all.

How fun is that?

Even if you don’t answer the phone, while it rings, you can’t use your internet.

I’m so glad that we don’t get a lot of telemarketers, or I’d never get my photo back-up done.

Lesson learned: I am incredibly thankful for the internet that I have at home in Ohio, and at school, which was more often than not relatively reliable. I guess this is just another quirk of living here in the boonies.

[gertier-blog]

La Lesson #9: Long distance is hard

I’m the first to admit that I grew up in a technologically advanced household. I can hardly remember a time when my parents didn’t own a computer. They were amongst the first of my friend’s parents to have caller id and that crazy tape-less answering machine called voicemail. My parents have had cell phones for my childhood years, and although it wasn’t until I was 15 that I owned one, cell phones have been very much a part of my life for quite some time.

So I guess I took all of this phone technology a little bit for granted.  I know that my phone technology is far from top of the line, but I never expected I’d ever live in a place where at least the same level of phone technology wasn’t available.

I was proven wrong…

My cell phone doesn't work most of the time here, (I guess there aren't enough Verizon towers nearby) so I've been resorting to the next best thing. The ever faithful, easy to use, landline.

Let me set the stage for the Gen-Y blunder I encountered the other day.

Enter our protagonist, Gert. It’s a rainy day, and I’m at work, needing to  make a phone call. I obtain the phone number from the secretary, and head to my desk to make the call.

Enter, our antagonist, the ever-famous office phone. A lovely shade of black and red, this baby has 4 lines and 20 potential extension numbers.

I sit at my desk and pick up the receiver. Realizing that someone is already on line one, I select  line 2, and dial the phone number.

ERREEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOpppppppppppppp! I’m Sorry, your call can not be completed as dialed, please hang up, and try again….

Oops, I think. I must have dialed the wrong number; I guess I’ll try again. I repeat my attempt, and this time I am greeted by a different, but no-less helpful message..

ERREEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOpppppppppppppp! I’m Sorry, the AT&T number you are calling has been disconnected, or does not exist, please check the number and dial again.

Well, maybe I wrote the number down wrong… I exit the room and consult with the secretary once again, who assures me that I have the correct number, but that the area code is different than the office phone. I write down the new one, and thinking that I have it all resolved, I go back to my office to make the call. I dial, and am met by yet another message.

I’m sorry, the area code you have entered does not exist, please check the area code, and try again.

By this time, I’m flustered. Never before have I encountered such difficulty in calling any individual. Yet, the ever clever gen-Y-er I am, I  google search the area code, and find out that I do indeed have the correct area code. But this time, I’ve uncovered my fatal flaw.

You must dial 1+ the area code+  the number, when you are calling long distance.

The worst part of this for me, was that I know to do this when I dial an out of town number, but this time, I didn’t even know I was calling long distance, so I had never thought to do so. Heck, I didn’t even know many people still used long distance to call within the United States,  I just thought that 1 was a level of redundancy.

When I first arrived, I learned quickly that my grandmother did not have caller-id. But somehow that had been easy for me to blindly accept because she doesn’t play nice with technology, even technology that was new 15 years ago. (though her kindle has a better life than most cats) Its ok, I still love her. But the long-distance calls? I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to the idea of calling long distance within the US. If I was calling my parents in Ohio from China, or Mexico, or anywhere else in the world, I’d understand. But is there really a reason for it state-to-state?

Who knew long-distance calling could be so hard? Lesson Learned…