To function or not to function

I've just spent all afternoon taking notes for my chemistry exam on Tuesday. It's depressing to think I still need to memorize them. This test will be harder for me than the last one because it's just so hard to understand what it's all about which is very hard on my pride. Not only do we have to know how chemicals bond, but we also have to know their shapes--sigma bonds versus pi bonds. Along with that, we have to know how to figure the energy involved in breaking and forming bonds. Then there are the different kinds of forces--dispersion, dipolar, & Hydrogen bonding. We also have to know how to figure osmotic pressure. Then there is DNA versus RNA, the structures of 11 different functional groups, etc.

On top of all that, I need to study for the final on Thursday. We are allowed to take in a 5x8 notecard with anything written on it that we so desire. Since he said that our final would consist of things off previous tests, my lab partner took all the exams and shrunk them onto hers. I may try some of that, along with some formulas and constants. All in all, I would highly recommend avoiding chemistry to one and all. I will have to admit that I thoroughly enjoyed the lab though. I was a little nervous in my first assignment of the final which was identifying 4 unknown solutions. You have to use flame tests and precipitation tests along with logic to eliminate possiblilites and nervousness isn't conducive to logic. But after I made it through that one, it was a breeze. And I'm totally thrilled that I got a 100% on the practicum part of the exam and only missed one on the written part and ended up with a 97 for the term.

I'm looking forward to my Math class next term, but I'm a little leary of the Psychology class. I guess you could say the Developmental Psychology class I took at WKU left a bad taste in my mouth.

Things at work are going much better now. I was totally dreading this week. I had this really horrible day on Friday, and I'd finally just had it up to my eyeballs. I was emotionally distraught because I couldn't do my job and felt like I was being sabotaged at every turn. So I finally e-mailed the manager and demanded an explanation. I had e-mailed him before asking him some round about questions while trying not to reveal my distress and never received a response. I started hearing little tidbits from keyers and other supervisors, none of whom really knew much of anything about anything So I got straight to the point in this e-mail although I never mentioned feeling sabotaged or distraught. I just wanted an explanation as to why things were being done this way. He must have read between the lines because half an hour before I was due to leave, the supervisor came out and asked to talk to me. Our relief was there so we could leave them to it. She told me that the manager had called and advised her to talk to me and that I thought she didn't like me (which I had not said). She was very distraught that I might think that because she said I was her favorite supervisor and better than any they had. She apologized for how she came across and for not telling me what they were trying to accomplish. We both ended up crying, emotional females that we are. Without going into any complicated details, we made an arrangement that would compensate me for what she was taking away while she got accomplished what she was trying to do on her end. And now things are much better. I also got an e-mail from the manager apologizing for not communicating with me and assured me that I was doing a great job and that the other supervisor was my biggest fan. In fact, he had given me Saturday/Sunday off until she demanded to have me back on Saturdays when she worked because she didn't want to work with anybody else. Thanks a lot for taking my Saturdays! So I feel much better now with the air cleared between us.

I was really hoping Tamy wouldn't work the holiday so we could go do something, but she signed up for it. So if I want to do something, I'm on my own. So off to bed I go so I can get up and spend my Memorial day studying!

work complications

I suppose another update is in order. I don't know that I have much to say this week except that I'm alive and well. I'm having fewer allergy complications since I'm down to just sneezing. It's such a relief to get rid of all the coughing and sinus pressure.

Work has presented a complication recently and I'm not really sure how to handle it. For those of you who are unaware of how postal operations work, there are 2 main operations we are concerned with. One is letters and the other is flats. Letters are your normal-sized personal or business letters, etc. Flats, on the other hand, are larger. They can be magazines, manilla envelopes, flyers, etc. Letter images are compressed as data and buffered. The buffered data is then sent to us and the keyers receive the images on their computer monitors to key in the addresses. Flats is a bit different. We get the images live as they are being run. We have approximately 90 seconds to key these images before they "time out." 90 seconds for an image is plenty of time, but if you are sent 200 images, you don't have 90 seconds times 200 to key it. You have 90 seconds from the time the images arrive to key all of them. Multiple plants (approximately 21) are sending across each system and we have 5 systems in place. So if it takes a keyer 10 seconds to key an image, he or she will only be able to key 9 images in that time frame.

Currently flats happen to be my domain. I supervise it from 3 to 11:30. It is my job to make sure I have enough keyers to key the volume before it times out. The second thing I am responsible for is to not build up "idle time" which means when a keyer is logged on with no images to key. Some keyers cooperate very well by switching their terminals from site to site or from flats to letters. We have both capabilities. Other keyers have to be told repeatedly even though they know that's what you want them to do. In flats you also don't know how much volume you will have at any given second. You could have anywhere from 1 image to 600+ coming across at one time on one system. I've experienced both and they are both very frustrating. My fingernails are proof enough of that! The ideal is to have a steady volume coming across without much fluctuation which rarely happens. Now as it happens, whoever is running the letter operations is the one who takes the attendance and tells people where to go. I have to tell them how many people I need each time a group of people comes in. I have to know when my heaviest times are and I have to compensate for people taking lunches and leaving at the end of their shifts. But if I tell them that I need 10 people, they may not give me 10 people. So your working relationship with the letters supervisor is crucial.

The one I normally work with is great. She has run flats before and knows how essential it is to have enough people. But my problem is that twice a week I have to work with one who has issues. She knows there are certain people I like to have on flats because they are fast keyers, they know what I expect them to do and do it without being told, and they like to be on flats. There are more people who dislike keying flats than like it which is quite opposite of how it was in Bowling Green. Instead of giving me these people, she sends them to letters and sends me the slower keyers who hate to key flats. When a person hates something, they tend not to do their best at it. They may be sulking because they don't want to be there and take a long time to switch over when I need them. Or they may just be naturally slow. I don't know if this supervisor is doing it deliberately to annoy me or to annoy the keyers or because she gets a thrill out of making somebody do something they don't want to do. We had a confrontation over it the last time she worked because I had grabbed one of my usual keyers as they went by to help out because I was experiencing very heavy volume and not nearly enough keyers and she was my fastest keyer. She became quite irrate when she saw this particular keyer in flats because she had sent her to letters. I explained the necessity of it and I thought she was ok with it. But she did it to me again. Not only that keyer, but every keyer I usually had. When I'd ask for 5, she'd send me 3 claiming she needed them on letters. On top of that, the keyers who were going to lunch, weren't coming back to me like they were supposed to. So instead of getting more and more keyers as my volume increased, I was getting fewer and fewer. My direct supervisor must have sensed something was up because of my running up and down the isles constantly moving people around. He came and asked if I was ok. I was a bit terse in my response that I was surviving. He asked if I needed more keyers, and I told him that I was already sent all the keyers letters could afford. He said that was pure foolishness and marched off into the letters office. Soon the supervisor comes marching out and started counting my available flats/letters switchable seats and sent me that many keyers. She never said a word to me and was very abrupt with me the rest of the night. By the end of the night, after she was running out of letters and sending people home, I had plenty of keyers. But the damage had already been done. One site in particular had a 20+ percent time out rate. I managed to get it down to 5 by the end of the night, but that is personally unacceptable to me. Overall, I had a 2.9% rate, but my goal is to have it under 2%. To say the least, I was very upset the whole night. I tried to convince myself that she wasn't doing it deliberately. But my mental state wasn't very conducive to that kind of thinking. To make matters worse, according to some of the other staff, she is the golden child of the manager. I feel a lot better after 2 days off, but I'm not sure what my reaction will be the next time she works. I don't know if I should just quietly endure, or if I should call her out on it. I hate confrontations!

School is going better for me since I got an A on my last Chemistry exam. It made me feel a lot more normal. I did make one silly little goof which cost me my 100%. I sure could have used that to bring my other 2 B's into line. So I'm still coping with a B average since an 89.7 is still a B to the professor. Now if I can just get an A on the next exam and on the final, I'll be fine. I'm not too worried about my final because it will consist of things off of the other exams with numbers changed on the problems. He keeps trying to scare us with it by saying that if we haven't started preparing for it, we're in trouble because it is 9 pages long. I'm more worried about my lab exam which is this Thursday. Our professor told us today what we will have to do. We'll have 25 written questions then we have to do several experiments in the lab. One is a titration to find the concentration of an unknown acid, one is identifying 4 unknown solutions by means of flame tests and precipitation reactions, and the last two are just some simple things like weighing samples and testing for acids, bases, neutrals and electrolytes.

We did another interesting experiment today. First we had to cut and bend some glass tubing in fire then we had to do a reaction involving alka-seltzer and hydrochloric acid to measure the amount of carbon dioxide produced. It involved a lot of calculating to find the vapor pressure of the water it was done in, along with finding the moles of carbon dioxide and the weight percent in the tablet. Then we had to find the weight percent according to the ingredients on the label and from there find our percent of error. My partner and I had a 4 percent error rate which was very good. It was quite fascinating. Tomorrow we get to make soap by mixing vegetable oil and sodium hydroxide and boiling it. We'll then have to do some tests on our soap to test it's acidity and how it will react with hard water versus soft water. And that will be my last lab before the exam. I'm definitely going to miss that class. But I won't miss the chemistry lecture class.

Well since I've rambled on more than I thought I would, I'd better get some studying done before I head off to work.

Here's my update for the week...

Work is going great. I'm really enjoying supervising because I get to work with the people. I enjoy getting to know them as I work with them more. As a supervisor, you get to hear all these life stories or circumstances. Since I've come back to tour 3 (3 to 11:30), I've been the main supervisor for the flats operation. My boss changed my days off this week to Sat/Sun so I'd be supervisor for the main days of the week (Mon-Fri). I don't know if this will remain that way or not.

School has had its ups and downs. The downs being the exams. I think the material is fascinating, but I can't seem to find the time to study. I pretty well have to prepare myself for my Friday exam on the weekends before which means we haven't even touched the material yet. On this last Friday's exam, I think I messed up one of the problems on limiting reactants because I used the required moles instead of the available moles in my equation. That will affect at least 3 other answers dependent on that equation. The problem was worth 20 points which really hurts. I think I did well on the rest of the test though.

The labs are the fun part. We did this really fascinating lab where we worked with copper. We started out with copper wool and added a solution of nitric acid which disolved the copper into a blue liquid. We then added sodium hydroxide which is a base. We then diluted it with some more distilled water and heated it to boiling on a bunsen burner. This turned our solution black. Then we filtered it with a Buchner funnel which involves a vacuum. The result was the separation of the copper oxide (a salt) from the liquid. We then poured sulfuric acid over this which dissolved it back into a blue liquid form. Then we put little chunks of zinc into the solution which produced a hydrogen gas and turned the copper into a solid and the blue disappeared from the liquid. The copper was now the normal copper color. It was absolutely amazing to see how we could change it back and forth from a solid state to a liquid state. Our professor was quite emphatic on his emphasis on safety for that lab because he said there were about 15 different ways we could kill ourselves that day. The acids were very corrosive and some of the solutions were highly flammable. We always have to wear goggles in the lab even if we're not working with acids and gases.

I had a really interesting church experience this morning. I went to another new church with one of my co-workers. This was a non-denominational church that was 95% black 5% white. Nobody worships God quite like the black people do. You just have to be happy when you're surrounded by them. They PRAISE the Lord. This was a fairly large church, and they knew I was coming. From the time I stepped in that door until I sat down, I think I got about 50 hugs from total strangers. My co-worker was in the praise team so she had told everybody she could see to watch for me and make sure I sat where she would sit after she was done singing. After the service she dragged me all over meeting this person and that because she was so proud that I had come. I sure hope I'm not called upon to remember all those names. I gathered from the conversations after the service that her husband is a police officer. Several people were complaining that when he sees them on the streets he honks at them and points accusingly at them making them appear guilty in front of the other motorists.

The sermon was really something. He preached on the headship order. The way he preached, you'd have thought he was a Mennonite! :-) He said that when you see women pastors, there is something wrong in that church. God only raises up women to leadership roles when the men aren't doing what they are called to do as in the case of Deborah in Judges. He also said that a lot of women today have to wear both the pants and the skirt, and it's wrong. He said that women WANT to be protected and cared for and will always have their fantasies of the "knight in shining armour" which is why they love romance novels. They read these and then they look at their husbands and just shake their heads. You should have heard the "amens" from the female portion of the audience. He even talked about women being silent and when they have a disagreement with what the pastor preached, they are supposed to go to their husbands. The husband will then discuss it with the pastor if there is a need to.

That's my update for the week, now I'm off to study some Chemistry.

Chemistry woes

The woes of tests are upon me. I had my first Chemistry exam today and I'm devastated. I saw online that I made an 87 on it. It has to be the problem on kinetic energy that I was grappling with because it was worth 15 points and he would give partial credit for using the correct formula. And since I answered that the room wasn't long enough, that was probably right. I don't think any problem should carry that much damage on a test.

So here is the problem as best I can remember it....

Some dude is running this experiment on this neutron in a room that is 10km long. The kinetic energy of this neutron is 9.0 x 10 to the -3rd power J. The mass of the neutron is 4.5 x 10 to the -10th power kg. What is the distance this neutron will travel in 1 minute. Is the room long enough?

What I came up with after I got home was 379 km. On the test I came up with 12 km. It all has to do with the decimal place and I'm still not sure what the right answer is

By the way, for those of you who don't know, the formula for kinetic energy is E = 1/2 m u squared.


I did find out what a mole is. It took me about an hour of intellectual reasoning for my mind to accept it. I can't just accept the fact that a mole is 6.022142 x 10*23 atoms in 12 g of Carbon-12. I have to say why carbon, and why 12 grams? Why not 1 gram, and why not oxygen or Hydrogen? So while I sat in a traffic jam on my way to work. I talked this thing through--out loud mind you. It's a good thing the people around me couldn't see me pounding my steering wheel emphatically or hear me arguing with my phantom professor on the merits of carbon vs. sodium or whatever element I so desired it to be. I have now gone beyond the arguing stage to the acceptance stage. I even get the molar mass thing. By the way, those of you in the throes of algebra, what happens to an exponent when you are taking the square root of it? Is it halved? That's what's coming to my brain, but I must be certain on these things. Oh for the days of simple algebra!

I haven't fully decided on whether I like this professor or not, but I'm leaning toward the "not" side of things. He seems very arrogant to me. He spews forth with plenty of verbage but inspires little understanding. If somebody asks a question and a knowledgeable student throws out a comment, he demeans them with snide remarks and asks them if they want to take over teaching the class. He will say things like, "no question is a stupid question" and then he asks if anybody has any questions. Somebody will ask one and he says, "if you want to discuss that, meet with me after class." As if a working class girl like me has the leisure time to discuss chemistry after class! It's off to work I go so I can pay him to embarrass his students. Believe me, I won't be asking any questions in that class.

Student update

Well, I'm once again a student. And once again, I'm wondering what in the world makes me think I can do this! I must say, I'm thankful I took Chemistry at Western even if it only transferred as an elective. My Chemistry professor at WKU eplained things. My Chemistry professor at UTC just says things and assumes you know what he's talking about. He jumps from atoms to molecules to elements to homogeneous compounds to heterogeneous compounds with very little pause. Fortunately, I know what he's talking about because I had to thoroughly memorize every detail of those definitions for those horrendous chemistry exams at WKU. But if I hadn't had that other class, I think I'd be totally lost. In addition, since this is a summer semester of 4.5 weeks; he is doing a chapter or more a day and our first exam is Friday. Hello!! This is Tuesday!

The real horror was my chemistry lab. After reviewing the syllabus, the professor throws this Math Review at us. I read the first thing and totally panicked. I couldn't remember the rules for significant figures. Which zeroes count???? Which don't???? HELP! The scientific notation didn't bother me. But the real stumper came with this problem--go ahead and try it.

QW = xSU

let Q = 0.887 atm, W = 0.023 L, S = 0.08206 L x atm/(mol x K), and U = 298K

I was so lost, I didn't even bother. What is a mol pray tell? And I think K stand for the Kelvin temperature scale. So where does that leave me? Exactly nowhere!

Of course, there were plenty of easy ones like "A lightning flash is seen and then 3.5 s later the thunderclap is heard. How far away in miles did the lighning strike? (the speed of sound is 1087 ft/sec)

And there is my update for the day. I'm off to bury my nose in my text book.