Well, not fire; firing someone from a volunteer gig is like dropping a brick on jello. But I let her know that today was the finale.

Basic synopsis is this: I get in at 11am, do this and that re: my experiment, wrap up the first part at around 12:40--and she's not in my office. I told her to come by at 12:20. She said via phone message that she rang several times, noone came, and then she called.

True, noone was down there at 12:20. At 12:30, though, my advisor was. I know if I were expected to show up for a volunteer gig, I'd sit outside and occasionally ring until someone let me in. Staying for 10 or even 15 minutes when you said you'd be around until 2:30 ain't cool.

Then of course there's the wrinkle that she'd been told three times to get a security swipey let-in badge from the police. Would have solved the getting in problem.

It's built up to this over time. It got to be a joke among the staff and I, actually. "Oh, is she gonna show up today this time?" I don't feel any blame in it, nor am I getting any. I'm a good judge of potential, but hauling your ass and giving a damn ain't potential; that's USING potential. And it seemed like her tan got more attention than my project.

For me, it was honestly more work reminding her of X, Y, or Z than anything I got out. Just today I spoke with my immediate supervisor and advisor about it at length, and I felt stupid wasting their time on this. I fully agreed with and encouraged my advisor to yank the letter of reference he wrote for her from the school file. That doesn't mean yanking it from professional schools she already applied to, so I feel comfortable with it. Truth be told, I agree with my advisor: we got played. She needed a letter from some prof, and she got one despite his reservations.

For one, she said she'd improve, and she didn't. You can't say one day that you can only come in once a week for two hours, then say another day that it's no problem to re-schedule. I know how waitressing jobs work, and shifting your hours so that you cover a 3-11pm shift isn't difficult. Might suck, especially for the summer, but it takes sacrifice to volunteer at a lab. My getting paid only a grand for the summer is a good example.

Only thing I regret now is having to read her reply letter. After today I switched from "hey, she hasn't been in much but she has potential" to "...professional ethics won't let me be lenient anymore. This ends now. Not in the fall; now." And I want the situation done with.

So now it's just the one undergrad, the one who despite her work, despite all the same entanglements, despite major schedule changes that annoyed her supervisor, and despite it being summer--comes in. Why? She likes working with monkeys. I can tell it's a pain in the ass to schedule lab time, but she's consistently there and willing to help. Plus she listens, and she'll be around for another 3 semesters.

In other news, no news.

Oh, wait. I finally reached the end of the 'cleaning up someone else's stupidity' saga.

Ok check this out.

So I've been working on some data from a large survey that was done back in 1991, basically about mental, emotional, and personality characteristics and how that affects the number of colds and flus you get--as well as how good you are at recalling how many.

One of the measures was this super famous personality inventory, that breaks personality down into five 'factors': agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, extraversion, and openness. The problem was, some dingbat way back when summed all five of those separate scores into one total score.

At first I wondered: "does that actually mean anything?" Much later, I would learn this: no. But I strived to figure out just what was going on. And thus began my search.

Upon a mottled horse and through fog-choked thickets and marshes, I searched plain and mountain, forest and desert, all in the hopes of finding some tome that could help me score such an inventory. I had all of the original, raw, un-screwed with data, after all. I just needed the key to unlock the magic within those coffee-stained pages--and to undo an ancient error lost to time. I emailed far and wide: to professors, to fellow grads, to a prof in psychiatry. And, finally, after two weary weeks of wandering, it came to pass that I found it from the bill of a little bird.

And having had myself and my two undergrads re-entering all of that old data into computers, I compiled it all, realized that you shouldn't have 240 sheets for 163 original participants, further realized that only some of those 240 people had done the survey study...and then promptly wondered why 18 people didn't seem to have done this personality test inventory thingy.

But hey: I'll take it. And so far the results look interesting. I'll have to screw with it alot more this week, but I'm only doing one other experiment monkey tomorrow.

Speaking of which, I called A, my other undergrad, to confirm the appointment. That's good to go. Like many people, she needs to move to a new apartment this week. Me, I'm in this place 'til near the end of 2006. It's decent, the landlord is a cool guy, and the location is sweet. I walk to work or wherever I need to go--which is great considering Heir Shrubbenfuhrer complete inability to drive down petrol/gas prices. He's too busy fending off accusations about flipping off the press, anyway.

But almost half of the people in the states love him. And besides "he's strong and determined," I can't get a single logical reason for WHY they love him. I'm a reasonable left-of-center kind of guy. If you have a set of good, logical reasons why he's been an effective leader, tell me, convince me. But besides vague notions that the invasion of Iraq set off Democracy dominoes, I don't see results with the current foreign policy.

And I do see two wars being fought with no War Tax being levied against Americans. And that disgusts me: as much for Republican pussyfooting as Democrat pussyfooting. If we, as a nation, are going to fuck up another nation based on bad intelligence and back-seat eagerness (read: hot and horny), the least we could do is pay for the repairs and our troops well-being. Instead, we give major tax cuts during war time while the Chinese and Japanese shell out hundreds of billions of dollars to float our economy. What's worse, the Chinese want chinese corporations to buy and incorporate American mega-corporations. Free trader fwappers may argue that international company trading happens all the time, but it is disastrously disproportional when it comes to Chinese and the US.

God I love it when I ramble and get my mind spunk on everything.

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