Caveat Lector

So I’ve been given more or less carte blanche to design something for the Wisconsin Historical Society’s new intranet. Make it pretty, he said.

Well. Um. Okay. So not a web designer.

But I like some of the sites I see that use a photo affixed to the viewport as background, so I went cruising for suitable photos. I should learn not to do this. I could get lost for years in all the cool photos they’ve got.

Finally I stopped myself. What I need, I said, are pictures of and from the buildings. That only makes sense. One click back to the home page, one click to “About Us,” and boom, there’s the link I want, to pictures of the very impressive WHS building. (Hear me, Jim? The navigation’s grand.)

Oh, but then I find a link to pure unadulterated inspiration. What a rush. Seventeen different flavors of design “bingo!” I purely love mosaics, I purely love printer’s marks—and the colors on these ought to be fantastic as grounding for a web page.

Knowing me, I won’t be able to make it work. Still. I love a good moment of inspiration.

This being the end of National Poetry Week, I feel the urge to post poetry on CavLec. Not my own; you may thank any or all deities you can think of that I quit writing poetry after the teenage angst period.

I dearly love the gem following. Code-switching, a full Latin declension, rhymes providing crucial clues about pronunciation (I was never taught to pronounce my Latin that way!), and a wee bit of public-transportation angst. What’s not to like?

Without further ado, then, A. D. Godley’s “Motor Bus”:

What is it that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
Implet in the Corn and High
Terror me Motoris Bi:
Bo Motori clamitabo
Ne Motore caeder a Bo—
Dative be or Ablative
So thou only let us live:
Whither shall thy victims flee?
Spare us, spare us, Motor Be!
Thus I sang; and still anigh
Came in hordes Motores Bi,
Et complebat omne forum
Copia Motorum Borum.
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!

Ow. Enough said.

“How long has this been going on?” the doctor asked me.

“Years,” I said honestly.

“Why are you coming in about it now?”

Could someone who’s a doctor kindly explain to me the point of this question? And how I’m supposed to answer it?

I mean, I can think of several answers. There’s the entire sociology of women and self-neglect, but that would take far, far longer than a half-hour appointment to explain. There’s my personal history of doctors blowing off my symptoms, but somehow I don’t think doctors like to hear about their patients’ bad experiences with them.

There’s “BECAUSE IT EFFING HURTS, DAMMIT, AND I WOULD LIKE THE PAIN TO STOP NOW PLEASE.” I dunno, though. Is that too obvious?

It just seems to me that the question is phrased to express maximum disbelief and disapprobation. You’ve been hurting for years, why bother me about it now? Life hurts. Suck it up and deal. Or Coulda helped you years ago, you moron. What kept you? And the tiny little sniff that invariably greets whatever answer I actually give (I said, “Because I’ve tried all the self-care options I can think of, and nothing is working.”) does not improve doctor-patient rapport. At least, not when I’m the patient.

If you want to make the point that early treatment helps, that isn’t the way to do it. A little sympathy might do the trick: “I’m so sorry you didn’t seek treatment earlier. We might have been able to save you a lot of pain.”

But putting me on the spot doesn’t work. Makes me even less likely to come in next time.

“If it’s making things worse,” a friend of mine commented in response to my brace whining, “you probably were misdiagnosed and you ought to call the doctor back.”

Yeah, yeah. And have ’em call me uncooperative and send me back home. There is a system to these things. The next time I go in, a couple months from now, I can politely ask for a referral to an orthopedic specialist and actually have some hope of getting one. If I go storming in there after one day, though, forget it.

If I can show that I followed treatment instructions to the letter and still got worse, I’m golden—because they won’t want the lawsuit.

I’ve lived with pain over a decade. I can live with it a little longer in order to get it fixed right this time. Finally.

But, dammit, this finger numbness is getting annoying.

Kendall Grant Clark has got another installment of his dijalog series up. Go and read, especially if you’re a librarian, because there’s much librarian-ego-stroking goodness there.

(You wanna know what we do with our master’s degrees? “Cataloging is daunting, non-trivial work. You don’t have to read the 600 pages of Wynar’s Introduction to Cataloging and Classification, you just have to avoid dropping it on your foot… cataloging ain’t for wimps or amateurs!” says Clark. Right the heck ON.)

A comment on the article: it’s quite sane and rational to let librarians do the classification, and grab numbers from them. (I suggested this very system to a friend of mine not long ago—but before I entered library school, so go me.) I would add, however, that it makes sense to use the same source (same library catalog) for your cataloguing information whenever possible. The same book may not have the same call number in all libraries; it depends in part on how in-depth the library collection goes in that particular subject area, whether the book lives in the reference section or the main stacks of that particular library, and other such oddments. To reduce potentially unhelpful variation, stick with the same catalog as much as possible.

Oh, and UDC is introduced in the article without explanation. Rectifying that would be good.

Looking forward to next installment’s code. That should be wizard cool.

I’m not sure I’m going to make it eight weeks with these damnable braces.

I’m supposed to wear the thumb one—the big ugly white plastic thing—at night. I woke up in the middle of the night with my shoulder on fire, and promptly took the damn brace off. A minor case of deQuervain’s isn’t worth this!

And the under-elbow band? I don’t like it. It pinches. And it feels funny when I type. Not good funny. Bad funny. Especially where ulnar nerve crosses wrist, which is $DEITY help me what I am trying to fix in the first place.

Maybe this will all resolve in a day or three, as I get used to the gear. Until then, I’m afraid, y’all just get to listen to me whine a lot.

Okay, so no surgery yet. That is the good news.

The bad news is that I believe I may have been misdiagnosed. Not as bad as it sounds, because I have license to come back in should what the doc suggested not work. At least there’s motion here.

She thinks I’ve got tennis elbow (the fancy name for which is “lateral epicondylitis”), which I think is just plain wrong—but I’m trying the suggested palliative (a brace with a tendon pad just below the elbow) anyway. (It actually seems to be numbing my arm somewhat. Not at all sure that’s a good thing.) Plus no heavy lifting with the left hand, which I suppose means that David gets to come shopping when we need kitty litter.

She also diagnosed a bit of deQuervain’s tenosynovitis—in other words, I seem to have messed up my left thumb some. This is eminently possible. The fix is an ugly thumb-immobilizing white plastic cast that I wear at night and whenever I don’t actually need my thumb all that much. (My husband, bless him, grabbed a dry-erase marker and started drawing all over the hideous thing, so now I have a hippy white plastic cast with flowers and peace symbols and stuff. An improvement, definitely.)

The key words to my mind—and she did say them, which is good—are “ulnar nerve,” which is the nerve that runs through the funny bone down to the ring and pinkie fingers of the hand. I think that’s the problem, and I also think there’s an entrapment somewhere that she didn’t find.

But I don’t mind waiting a couple-three months to get down to brass tacks on that. Worst comes to worst, at least I’ll know a few more things that don’t work.

Today’s Organization of Information guest speaker was the sysadmin for the campus Voyager installation. Lots of super-geeky library-style fun with Oracle and batch jobs and instantaneous updating.

(I am probably the only person in class who thought it was fun. But we all know I’m weird.)

The tidbit that made me sit up and clap gleeful hands, though, was the news that we’re finally getting a link resolver! Chewy instantaneous-known-item-retrieval goodness! It’s about time!

Oh, and hey, Unicode support coming soon to an OPAC near you! I raised my hand when I heard that. “Isn’t that going to cause a major recataloguing effort on transliterated records?” I asked.

She grinned. I love it when people can take unexpected questions (and I don’t think she expected to be talking to anybody who knew Unicode from a hole in the ground) in stride. Nah, she said, not a problem (though she apparently had precisely that worry at first). The Library of Congress and Yale have been iterating on a conversion routine that appears to work with only a 0.04% error rate, most of that caused by improper cataloguing in the first place. On our collections, that’s only 3000 or so records. Quite manageable.

Coooooooooooool. I am suitably impressed. Moreover, I want to play with these systems something awful. Pity nobody’ll give me a job just learning how to fiddle with library IT.

So the TAA, in response to a proposed pay cut for its members, is striking today and Wednesday. They have also declared a willingness to delay final grades if a decent contract isn’t put on the table.

What is the official response to the grade-delay threat? “Oh, well, we’ll just get the faculty to do final grades.”

I. Am. Speechless. Half with laughter, half with horror.

Does Provost Peter Spear, the yobbo responsible for this particular bit of wild insanity, have no notion whatever of the extent of TA responsibility for undergraduate education on this campus? Does he think that TAs are given money out of pure charity on the university’s part?

I suppose that could be. Heaven knows some people are just that wilfully clueless.

Or does he value undergraduate education that little? Odd, for someone in his position. But possible, I suppose.

Let’s take a look at this proposal, shall we? Back in the day, I taught one section of Spanish 101 a semester, except in my last semester teaching, when I taught two sections of Spanish 203. A section topped out at 26 people, but in fairness, I typically had one or two drop. We’ll say 22 people per section, just to underestimate a bit.

Checking the fall timetable, I find that the plans are for 12 sections of Spanish 101, 18 of 102, 27 (whew!) of 203, and 16 of 204. Let’s say for the sake of argument that of these sections, ten will be taught by lecturers or slumming faculty (and I don’t actually think the number is that high). That leaves 63 taught by TAs. 63 times 22 is 1386.

Nearly fourteen HUNDRED final exams. Figure an eight-page final (typical, in my experience), that’s a bit over eleven thousand exam pages. To be graded by, um, let me check, twenty-seven faculty (being extremely charitable, I am, in allowing faculty on sabbatical, non-teaching faculty, and part-time or crosslisted faculty to count as full faculty members) plus a couple-three lecturers. In addition, of course, to whatever finals they have to grade for their own classes.

Can we just please say “not gonna happen, not even in Peter Spear’s deepest wildest fantasies” and sit back down at the table? Anything else is just utterly beyond disrespectful of the work I did back in the day, and the work that today’s TAs (such as my husband) are doing.

Tell you what. Won’t catch me crossing no picket lines, no sir. Go TAA. Represent, damn it.

Told my boss today that I’d be out Wednesday morning to see the doctor. Didn’t tell her why. AKMA knows, just like the rest of y’all do.

Yeah. Um. Not looking forward to this.

To some extent, it feels like going to the doc (different doc) back in early ’98 to convince them to tie my tubes. The barrier is belief. Can I make them believe I honestly truly don’t ever want biological children? (Managed that, thank heaven.) Can I make them believe I’ve done my hands sufficient damage to warrant serious intervention?

Because, you know, I’m functional. Most of the time. Two-three times a year it gets really bad, but I live through it; and the rest of the time I just manage. And, you know, are the now-and-then sleep disturbances from elbow and shoulder pain worth mentioning? What about the (extremely) occasional muscle spasms? The once-in-a-while loss of grip strength?

I guess I feel mildly guilty taking up medical resources with this, seeing as how it’s mostly live-with-able. At the same time, I’d like it to be taken seriously. Repetitive-stress problems tend to be dismissed as hysterics or work-avoidance. I’m not hysterical, and I don’t avoid work, thank you.

I’m ready to show ’em what I’ve done. Here, check out the freaky ergonomic keyboard. Yeah, and here are the wrist wraps and the heating pads and the office chair I insisted had to lose its arms (because resting my forearms on chair arms while working invariably causes pain), and do you really want to know how much Advil I can chug in a day?

It’s not working. Find me something that will work.

Of course, at this point “what will work” probably adds up to “surgery.” That’s going to be fun. I can still work one-handed, because data-checking involves far more staring at microfilm than actual typing, but what about summer school? And online RPGing? And poor CavLec?

Maybe I need to buy myself one of those one-hand chording keyboards and learn to use it. Eh, well. I suppose I’ll know Wednesday.