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From: jwgh at earthlink.net (Jacob Haller)
Subject: Re: Universal questionnaire
Date: 11 Apr 2000
Message-ID: <1e8xfaa.1s9wco06k6bicN%jwgh@earthlink.net>
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Thank you for provoking some of the lamest followups imaginable.

mathew <meta at pobox.com> wrote:

Universal Questionnaire

  1. Have you? Yes No
I came close, once, though. It happened like this:

I was a senior in high school and had been selected to go to a special luncheon with the superintendent of schools and the principal of my high school.

Perhaps two months previously I had been in a car accident (which was my fault) and had received a traffic citation for my troubles. My mother was to take care of paying the ticket, but she forgot to do until long after the ticket was due. Finally, the morning of the luncheon, she told me that she had mailed the payment off the previous day but I should be careful not to get pulled over for anything for the next day or two as it might lead to my arrest.

So off I drove to school, driving slowly both because of my mother's warning and because it had snowed the previous night and the roads were slippery. I got partway to school and realized: I had forgotten my permission slip at home. So I turned around and (time being short) rushed back home.

On the way home the car started to slide. I overreacted and hit the guard rail; or rather I would have had the guard rail been upright, but years of people doing the same thing I was doing had rendered it horizontal. So instead I ended up hanging halfway over a somewhat severe incline. I got out of the car, and it proceeded to slide the rest of the way down the incline. It was perhaps 20 degrees short of being completely vertical.

I hitched into town and convinced my gradfather, a retired corporate lawyer, to get the permission slip and come out and get me. This he did. But I still needed to go back to the car to get my book bag. (I now forget why this was important.)

When we got back to the car the police had arrived. I explained that I had been driving the car. The policewoman said that she was going to have to give me a ticket because of the 'excessive damage to the guard rail'. With my mother's warning ringing in my ears I handed over my license, but managed to say: "Here's my license, but the guard rail was like that before I went over it." She expressed skepticism, but my grandfather pointed out that there was snow on the guard rail, showing that it had been oriented the way it currently was the previous night before it snowed. She returned my license and I departed, free as a bird. I later learned it had taken two tow trucks to get the car back on the road, but miraculously it was largely undamaged. Apart from some cosmetic stuff. OK, and the muffler fell off a week later, but that could have been coincidence.

So no, I've never been arrested, but I did come close that one time.

  1. List your top three in order of preference.
It's tricky, and if you asked me on a different day (or perhaps even if you asked me in ten minutes) I'd probably give a different answer, but:
  1. Thelonious Monk. If I had to pick a particular piece I'd pick the original Blue Note version of "Mysterioso".
  2. Otis Spann.
  3. Jimmy Yancey. Particularly late Jimmy Yancey.
  1. For how long?
Not that long--perhaps only a month or two?--but already I'm better at it than I am at cribbage, which I've been playing for most of my life. There's probably a lesson in that, but I don't know what it is.
  1. Please select any of the following by placing a check-mark in the appropriate box:





Although I do have an Intel emulator installed so perhaps I should check off that box as well. But I assume that's not what you meant.
  1. Give the average value over the most recent interval.
Probably around ten. It's a little surprising to me; it wasn't that long ago that I barely listened to NPR at all.
  1. Go on to question 7.
  2. Complete this questionnaire in the space below, and then answer it.
Question: What would you change?

Answer:

Overall I'm pretty happy with it. I do sometimes feel a bit isolated, but that's just a result of telecommuting, I'd think.

Also, it would be nice to get some feedback now and again--and I'm not talking about "You're doing great and we're really glad to have you" though of course that's nice too--but some kind of a constructive discussion of what I'm doing, what I'd like to be doing, what I could be doing better, and perhaps what I should be spending more and less time on.

But really I'm quite happy with my job and these complaints are pretty minor.

-jwgh 

-- 
"They tell me I have a kind face.  I grew a beard to cover it.  Now
they tell me I have a kind beard."
         - Bob Dehnhardt, alt.sysadmin.recovery 11 Nov 1998

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