Tale #47 - The Tale of Orientation Day II

Hi, all!

Anyways, I've been a little busy. So the proper titles should have been "The Tale of Orientation WEEK" since I really didn't get back to this until about a week later.

So what happened?

Well.... on Orientation DAY, as our last pit stop, we took a tour of a Bombardier manufacturing plant to learn about the fine business art of Kaisan. However, since most thought Orientation day would only take up until half the day, most people couldn't stick around for the tour. So that left just four students including myself. The tour went over quite well except when we got to the fiberglassing area. Now to those of you who don't know, I have an extremely sensative sense of smell. (I also have good eyes and a great sense of touch, but that's a whole other story best saved for another time.) One of the things about having a great sense of smell is that I can pick up on stuff that most people in my family misses. I can also somewhat taste the smell in the back of my throat too. So on one hand, this can be an awesome thing. But on the other, I can actually have this work against me too. An example would be skunk. It's bad enough that I can smell it, but I can "taste" that smell too and it was god-aweful! The same goes for cigarette smoke. Can't be around smokers either. So bad smells tend to stick longer in the back of my throat and well that completely screws up my sense of taste for a moment or two and I pretty much am left coughing and hacking out my lungs if it's super bad. So as you can imagine with the fiberglass area, it was pure olfactory hell for me. I tried sticking it out as long as I could but I think everyone noticed that I wasn't handling the fiberglass smell too well. Eventually the tour came to an end and I learned much about the plant and the students who came with me.

Now move on to the other days of Orientation Week....

I had to pick up my student card and for some weird reason, this year was student card hell due to the huge line ups. So in waiting, I saw a checkers mini-tournament going on. I was bored so I decided to check it out. For those of you unaware, I hadn't played checkers in years. But when I did, I was pretty good at it. Since it had been a while, I opted to go and play in the mini-tournament. The guy I ended up playing against was the head of Student Sports & Rec. How about we just call him "Rec-Guy" for now. Anyways, Rec-Guy thought he was all that when he came to play against me. I wasn't sure if I had my ubber checker-playing skills left and thought I would be quite rusty. But as I started playing, it became quickly apparent that I can still kick someone's ass at this game. To make matter worse for Rec-Guy, we had an announcer with a megaphone who started teasing him when he lost. In the end, I managed to win a Hot Wheels taxi (which is sitting on my computer desk. You know how cool it is to keep toys and things on your computer desk to flaunt your geekyness! XD ) and a yo-yo. We sorta had a toys-theme going on.

So as it stand, over the course of Orinetation week, here's what I won:

- Bath soap (For being the only one in Marketing to be born in Septemeber. Am I the odd ball here?)
- A Student Union water bottle and pen set
- A stress ball that looks like a globe
- A yo-yo
- A Hot Wheels car

.... maybe I'm just too lucky or maybe I'm just at the right place at the right time.

So then comes classes. Now I was sure that Marketing and Media were pretty much cousines of each other. So I figured they would understand the same sorts of things. But what I quickly figured out was that none of them were Media-Geeks like me. They just didn't seem to understand the humor and I didn't understand why. I also didn't understand why when I brought up some of my computer experiances (it was unavoidable! One of my classes had us bring it up!), I get this weird stare from everyone accompanied with the shuffling away of the chairs on the linolium floor. So here I am sitting there confused. If Marketing and Media were cousines, why was I being looked at funny? This morning in that mental wake-up fog, it dawned on me - Marketers don't NEED to see under the hood and use the computer. They get the Media-geeks to do that for them. So this means that pretty much I'm the only one totally knowning the inner workings of the media end of things. So when I speak geek, they don't understand it. But they do understand numbers, facts and statistics where as I deal with that very little. I've got a rough understanding of how that works, but I need the diploma to prove what I know PLUS add on any extra skills. So now I get why Marketers freak about geek speak. But that also means that I've got to start holding back now. I feel a little trapped by this, but I know that I will get through this. I just have to watch my step now and just be aware of when I start to speak geek. This is going to be one unusual life-experiment.

Anyways, class is about to start and I've gotta get going. I will get some sketches up this week, I promise!