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Again, the Friday Five:

1. What is your current occupation? Is this what you chose to be doing at this point in your life? Why or why not? I’m a Staff Assistant with the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering at Penn State University. Although I suppose it could be argued that I chose to be doing this, what I tell people is that I sort of fell into it. My friend Sharon suggested I contact her old boss about possible part-time editing work, which I was at the time (and still) interested in procuring. That segued into a couple of hours in the evening five days a week (and some weekends), doing a lot of what I do now, just to a lesser extent and with more direct one-on-one work with my boss. Then, in September, a full-time position became available here, and I accepted it, not least of all because I make about three times what I did at my old job, and I don’t have to be on my feet all day in the basement of a bookstore. I do not, however, consider this my “career”.

2. If time/talent/money were no object, what would your dream occupation be? If talent were no object? Shouldn’t it be? Shouldn’t that be the main criteria in deciding on your dream job? I mean, the idea of being a gourmet chef sounds intriguing, but I can’t cook worth a damn, and so I probably wouldn’t enjoy it half as much as something for which I had genuine talent. I am, in the theory, a writer. “Not enough time”, “not enough money” — these are just excuses. A writer writes. I know this. Getting myself to do it is another matter altogether. Right now, I’d desperately like to start a zine (web or print — there are benefits to each), but writing an entire issue on my own seems like an impossible (and not particularly appealing) undertaking.

3. What did/do your parents do for a living? Has this had any influence on your career choices? My father is a chemical engineer, a director of research and development at Con Edison, while my mother is a registered nurse. I don’t think this has had any particular influence on me, although I sometimes note with amusement that neither my sister or I seem to have inherited our parents’ knack for the sciences.

4. Have you ever had to choose between having a career and having a family? No, not even remotely. I don’t really have a career, and the only family is the one I was born with.

5. In your opinion, what is the easiest job in the world? What is the hardest? Why? The easiest job in the world is the one, most likely, least worth doing. The hardest job is the job you don’t enjoy and in which you can take no real satisfaction.

I just finished watching an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in which Patrick Stewart’s Picard says, “Like Fermat’s equation, it may never be solved.” Problem is, Fermat’s last equation was solved. The future is just so unpredictable, isn’t it?

Well this is weird. According to my referrer logs, twenty-eight people apparently wanted to see what my weblog looked like through malfunction.org‘s Fulifier Error filter.

I haven’t come across the filter since (I discover after a little digging through archives and old e-mails) early October of last year. Weird to suddenly see twenty-eight links generated by it. Someone I know must have been really bored.

One of my least favorite work-related activities is taking documents that, for whatever reason, exist only as printed copies and scanning them into electronic files. This is a process that should be relatively simple, but which is rendered almost impossible by lousy text recognition software that can’t recognize certain characters, rearranges page format and layout, and transforms tables, equations, and figures into an incomprehensible mess that I then have to wade through and correct. This is both tedious and time-consuming, and, no matter how much I am able to finish, there is always more waiting for me.

In front of me now, I have page after page of equations — thirty pages left in all — which shouldn’t, but do, look like this:

J+1

J+l J+1 IN )i

Tia A & #64979; ggi

IE& #64979; tE 1 2 (A& #64979;6)

V

So I have to go through each page and correct the formatting, proofread for errors which are almost always there, and spend hours retyping equations that I do not understand, and which are often as difficult to read as they are to reproduce. I think I — and, by extension, my boss — will just have to accept that this is not something that can easily be finished in just one or two days. This is not a simple scan-and-save. This is an undertaking. And, frankly, it’s beginning to piss me off.