Thinking Fool

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May 18, 2005

New Developments...

Since my last substantive posting, which was written while I was still a law school student with a final paper and final exam hanging over my head, there have been some new developments worth mentioning. In the spirit of many Supreme Court justices, I am using the phrase "worth mentioning" quite loosely.

First, the unresponsive secretary responded at long last! The return receipt trick worked like a charm. Unfortunately, I discovered why she did not respond to my email inquests last week. Someone in her family died. In the words of Yoda, "Douche Bag, the Thinking Fool feels like.”

Second, the registrar's office personnel must have had a bottle of Jack Daniels somewhere in the office yesterday because the guys at the front desk did not treat me like a member of the Iraqi soccer team during the Saddam era. (Uday apparently tortured (I actually spelled that “torchered” initially – wow, I’m more tired than I thought) the players when they lost to provide them the proper amount of incentive to win (hey, if that doesn't work, what the hell will?).) Instead, I was treated like an actual living, breathing human being. Even the “Twerp” was quite nice. (Not to pile on myself, but I recently became aware that the Twerp actually was the victim of an assault at the hands of some of D.C.’s fine upstanding younger citizens. Apparently some kids, barely in the double digit years, hit the Twerp in the back of his head with a 2 x 4 as he was walking home one evening. Who the hell does this? Why doesn’t D.C. have the death penalty? Why do bad things seem to happen to people whom I blast in my blog? (Let me know if there’s anyone you want me to blast just in case I have some sort of special power, maybe this is the new Voodoo.) I arrived in the registrar’s office EXACTLY at 6:30 when the paper was due (no, I’m not completely irresponsible, my printer actually ran out of ink as I was printing the final draft – that slowed me down by about ten minutes and caused me to lash out with a slew of profanities in the process). When I rushed into the office, I was greeted with the words, "We're closed" or something like that to which I held up my phone and showed the time that was being displayed. "It's 6:30. It's 6:30. I'm here on time!" The Twerp responded, "We tell students that they have to go by our time, not by the time on their phones." Well, the registrar's official time is one minute faster than GPS time. This leads me to wonder - in time-sensitive situations, such as turning in papers and take-home exams, don't you think it might be helpful, and perhaps even wise, if the registrar's office actually synchronized its clock with GPS time instead of relying on some clock that looks like it needs a new battery every sixty days? In any event, the Twerp accepted my paper (since it was in the office on time) and actually said, "[Thinking Fool], no professor is going to care that the time stamp is a few minutes late. You’ll be fine!" This was quite a change in attitude from two weeks ago when the twerp caused a poor visiting student to cry by ruling with such an iron fist that even Stalin would salivate (note to Russia, if you need to raise money, dig up Stalin and start selling off pieces of his skeleton on eBay. You could make millions).

Third, here's a little piece of advice for current and future law students. If you're taking a class pass/fail, you might want to allocate more than 24 waking hours to study for the exam, especially if it is a statutory-based class and especially if you haven’t attended any class sessions in several months, nor ever cracked open the textbook. When the exam proctors (my school hires outside people to administer the exams. By "outside people," I mean the law center administrators must draw straws to see who has to go down to the local homeless shelter that day and ask, "Who would like to earn ten dollars today? We’d like you to administer an exam!”...anyway, when the exam proctors) gave us the signal to begin the Securities Regulation exam, I immediately opened my exam booklet and began reading the first question. After seeing some conglomeration of words similar to the following: "Mexicomm is a Mexican-based company with a U.S. subsidiary," I internally dropped several F-bombs and decided to proceed to the next question. (I had not counted on an international question and certainly wasn’t familiar with that particular area of law. I didn’t even take the time to read that portion of the outline I was using because I just thought, “There’s no way he’s going to ask us anything about this.” Oops.) When I saw the first few words of the second question, I thought, “Well, nothing like pissing away your law school career at the very last moment.” Fortunately, I glanced at question three and recognized a few issues, so I decided to begin there and work backwards. I'm pretty certain I dropped enough buzzwords and spotted enough issues (only because the exam was open book and open computer, i.e. we could use “Ctrl + F” to search our documents) to obtain the glorious "P" on my transcript, but I would have been a hell of a lot more comfortable had I allocated more time to learn the subject material. Say 48 hours instead of 24!

Fourth, I'm tinkering with the design of this site every now and then. Thanks to Buddha, the guru in charge of all things technical at thinkingfool.com, you should be able to increase and decrease the text size (some had complained that the text size was too small) just as you would be able to increase and decrease the text size on any other website. In addition, I've added many links on the right side of the page. Many are media-related, but all are worth taking a look! Feel free to peruse – they are wonderful procrastinating tools.

Finally, feels weird not to be a law student anymore. Graduation is this weekend. I really am going to miss the law school environment. It’s been a wonderful experience. [Sigh.]

Posted by fool on May 18, 2005 04:03 AM

Comments

Posted by: NYU Jew at May 19, 2005 06:29 PM

Posted by: Larry at July 1, 2005 09:15 PM