Exchanges with People that Make Your Brain Hurt

[kherbert05]

Several years ago I was in a Education Service Center class for teachers about computers. You were supposed to be an advanced computer user to take the class. We were given our laptops. The people at my table opened them - and raised their hands to announce their computers were broken. I explained several times that you had to press the power button and was told no laptops turn on when you open them.


We came back for our Saturday class - and several explained they couldn't get their homework done because they couldn't get on line. The teachers went around to trouble shoot. For the lady nearest me it turned out that she expected to get on the Region IV wifi from her house.


Region IV ESC is in Houston off 290 between the tollway and 290. The lady lived in either Pasadena (30 miles away)  or Beaumont (90 Miles away)


About that point I resigned myself to spending Wednesday evenings and Saturdays a couple times a month for 6 months pounding my head on the table. The class went from an advanced class to a basic class very quickly.




On a similar vein an election year during a primary. My school was a polling place. I got called out of my classroom and asked how do we hook the D and R parties laptops to our wifi. (These were not voting machines but a way for them to redirect people to the correct polling places and make reports of problems)


I said What wifi? We don't have wifi.


Principal - but you got on wifi to find me x information. (Something blocked by our filters but he needed it)


Me - that was my personal  AT&T USB stick and the connection requires me to stand on my head with my fingers in my ears. (maybe 3G - I still had a flip phone got my first Iphone the next generation) I don't have enough minutes for them to stay on line all day and I'm not going to stay till after 7 pm.


Principal - OK we will unplug councilor's computer and plug them into her drop.
My answer Wouldn't it be easier to just have them use her computer, besides I don't have a cord long enough (would have needed about 50 feet). Besides I got yelled at for plugging a non district laptop into the network last month (not much because a tech told me to). Why don't you call (Head of IT )and have them fix this. I don't have the authority to do any of this. (I'm classroom teacher not even Campus Instructional Technology Specialist)


One party said forget it we will just use our phones to call in. The other huffed and puffed that we were disrupting the election process. IT ended up stringing a ethernet cable along the ceiling to the Councilor's office and turning on an extra drop in there.


For the general elections that year - I sent an e-mail to our principal, AP, and the councilor reminding them to call IT and make arrangements.


We now have 3 wifi networks 1 for laptops, 1 for District IOS devices, and 1 for guests. The same guy still throws fits because the guest network kicks you off every 30 minutes.  We also aren't a polling place as often. Not since they scheduled a run off the same day as the TAKS (kiss the ring) Test and couldn't understand why TEA didn't want people on campus during the (bow down) almighty test)

[SheltieMom]

Kherbert, I could literally have written your post. I retired 7 years ago, but I was the computer teacher at my school in Texas for many years. You bring back many memories!

[Iris]

^I feel your pain from the other end. A number of times that I have enrolled for an 'advanced user' computer class and then been bored to tears because the whole darn class has been taken up with paying attention to the half dozen users that have never even seen the program before. For this reason my favourite courses are the ones that come with a booklet of the course notes. I work through that at my own pace while those students muddle about.

MY brain hurt came from the instructor that got miffed because I was doing this, as he felt that I should be following directly along with him. The fact that this meant that I frequently sat staring at the wall for 15 minutes while he sorted out problems with beginners was apparently just too bad, not to mention that he had dumbed down the content to beginner level and so was no longer teaching stuff that I didn't already know. Not his fault, sure, but stopping me from doing my own thing (i.e. learning the actual advertised content) was the brain hurty part to me.

[KB]

I'll just leave this here:

[Margo]

I'm in the uk and pop as a term for cordials/squash and fizzy drinks is the norm in my region. In fact when I was a child the "Pop Man" would come round in a large open backed truck with creates and creates of different fizzy drinks. A bit like a milk man but with pop. You gave him back your old bottles and he gave you new ones filled with more carbonated heaven.
It's a midlands thing apparently. Family that live more in the north think Pop is a term only used for carbonated drinks. 

I have to go find some dandelion and burdock now.

Mr Chick is from the North West and remembers the Lemonade Lorry - and money back on the empty bottles. He will join you for a dandelion and burdock; his sister drank American Cream Soda. He thinks 'pop' is carbonated drinks, the ones that went 'pop!' when you opened the bottle, not squash.

Where I was born we had white lemonade and brown lemonade. As far as I know, the only difference was that brown lemonade had a little caramel colouring in it, but I certainly thought it tasted different and I liked it better. It did mean that once you got to the age of using lemonade as a mixer, you had to specify 'martini and white, please'.

In Canada we had a company called the Pop Shoppe that was similar, they'd deliver all sorts of different flavours and pick up the empties.

What is squash?

Squash is cordial - you dilute it with water to get a non- sparkling drink. When I was little you used to get orange squash, lemon squash and Ribena (blackcurrant) but these days you get all sorts of different flavours.

[girlysprite]

I'm on a forum for breatfeeding moms. One person jokingly asked that if she'd be locked up, how long she'd be able to survive on her own fresh breastmilk - assuming she could drink from her own breast. The amount of people who seriously replied that they'd survive for a long time because it was a good source of liquid and nutrients was staggering. Yes, it was clear that the op meant drinking from your own breast...how can people not see the flaw in that plan?!

[Softly Spoken]

I'm on a forum for breatfeeding moms. One person jokingly asked that if she'd be locked up, how long she'd be able to survive on her own fresh breastmilk - assuming she could drink from her own breast. The amount of people who seriously replied that they'd survive for a long time because it was a good source of liquid and nutrients was staggering. Yes, it was clear that the op meant drinking from your own breast...how can people not see the flaw in that plan?!

CRUD MONKEYS!. What...? Buh...

Owie. *rubs head*

...Okay, first I have to confess the unfortunate mental images this conjured up were SOOOOOO not right.  And hilarious. 

I think the simple, first level of my brain saw the physical challenge  (not to put too fine a point on it, but I tried to treat it as a semi-logical/realistic scenario by assuming that whoever 'locked' the woman up would not give her a breast pump)...Then my more advanced reasoning kicked in and I thought about the suggested - well I don't know how to explain the concept: "recycling"? "self-cannibalization"? I'm no nutritionist/biologist/whoever-could-possibly-explain-the-logistics-of-this, but we are not biologically self-sustaining organisms. Eating and drinking are what help create breast milk. You have to put nutrients in your body to put nutrients in the milk. I'm fairly sure that the bodily process of creating milk uses up some of the bodies resources, and I don't know that drinking that milk would necessarily replenish them. If I understand correctly, if you were being starved you would eventually stop producing breast milk. If you could drink it, I think it might stave off dehydration for a little while...

Gah! I am breaking my own brain trying to figure out if this is possible! 

[VorFemme]

I'm on a forum for breatfeeding moms. One person jokingly asked that if she'd be locked up, how long she'd be able to survive on her own fresh breastmilk - assuming she could drink from her own breast. The amount of people who seriously replied that they'd survive for a long time because it was a good source of liquid and nutrients was staggering. Yes, it was clear that the op meant drinking from your own breast...how can people not see the flaw in that plan?!

Well, some of the more "gifted" might be able to do so - but not everyone.  If they had a cup, they could express milk into it.  And not as long as you'd think, because there would be a loss of nutrients and fluid over time to the "solid digestive waste" and "liquid digestive waste".....

There was a historical event some centuries before where a young mother kept her imprisoned father alive with her milk - I just don't remember the correct names, era, and exact location - but I think it was a man in France in prison for "heresy" of some kind.....I'll read anything - but sometimes the information retrieval glitches.

[BabylonSister]

Dehydration would come before any nutrient deficiency.  I was never so thirsty as when I was breastfeeding.  Since you are going to eliminate some of that water anyway, you'll run out pretty fast.


As to the mechanics, I hate to tell you but several full term pregnancies and extended breastfeeding will take care of that.




Which reminds me...




I am a strong believer in the benefits of breastfeeding for both mother and child.  I believe women should be encouraged to breastfeed and supported in their effort.  I do not, however, believe they should be bullied or guilted into it, nor should they be lied to.  During my years of breastfeeding, I saw quite a few brain-hurty statements on various forums.


1. One woman questioned all the mothers at her Church, asking them if they breastfed, and if not, what their excuse was.  And she complained on the forum that not one of them gave her a proper excuse.  Attempts to explain that those mothers were not accountable to her about their parenting decisions never got through to her.


2. I have a friend who is a lovely woman, but she is, err, opinionated.  She affirms that breastfeeding will not cause sagging.  She says that the weight gain from pregnancy does. Yes, it does, but that does not mean that breastfeeding does not contribute too.  If your breast become significantly bigger and heavier for several more months than just the pregnancy, how could it not cause sagging?

[kherbert05]

CLIP .....
Which reminds me...




I am a strong believer in the benefits of breastfeeding for both mother and child.  I believe women should be encouraged to breastfeed and supported in their effort.  I do not, however, believe they should be bullied or guilted into it, nor should they be lied to.  During my years of breastfeeding, I saw quite a few brain-hurty statements on various forums.


1. One woman questioned all the mothers at her Church, asking them if they breastfed, and if not, what their excuse was.  And she complained on the forum that not one of them gave her a proper excuse.  Attempts to explain that those mothers were not accountable to her about their parenting decisions never got through to her.

#1 burns me up - A couple of people had the nerve to tell my Mom that it was her fault that I have asthma and allergies.
1. My mom technically was diagnosed with hepatitis a couple of years before I was born. (Her blood count went from you are on deaths door to cured in less than 24 hours so the diagnoses was probably a math error in placing the decimal.)

2. We both nearly died when I was born

3. My skin condition is genetic and closely linked to food allergies in recent research.

4. My Mom was on the critical list with a life threatening fever when I had my first allergic reaction - I was less than 2 hours old.

Thank you for standing up for people like my Mom.

[nutraxfornerves]

What am I supposed to do with cash?

This is from Customer's Suck. OP is OK, but I won't vouch for language in subsequent posts.

[Hillia]

A woman on a mom's forum I sometimes read  posted that she couldn't understand why everyone didn't breastfeed...if it didn't work for you, you just didn't put in the effort.  And if you adopted your child, get your lazy self down to the doctor and get hormone shots and get pumping.

Fortunately, she was pretty roundly spanked by the rest by the forum. The most polite response was along the lines of 'who the heck do you think you are?'

[Piratelvr1121]

Good, I'm glad.  I tried to bf my first two and it was not easy at all with my first. I was even supplementing with formula because he was not getting enough from me since he had latching issues.   With my second we lasted till 6 months, also supplemented.  I did not like bf'ing at all and despite what so many said about it helping with the bonding process, I didn't enjoy it and was able to bond so much better with my boys when they were bottle fed because there wasn't the stress and worry of "is he getting enough?"  I was stressing and of course when mama stresses, the baby picks up on it and it's a vicious circle.

One day DH took my oldest away from me and gave him a bottle because I was getting really anxious and it wasn't helping anyone. 

I didn't bf the third one at all and while some might say my choice was selfish, both of us were happier, I wasn't stressed and we bonded just fine. 

There are benefits to bf'ing indeed, but it's not for everyone.   I know some women who treat it as being a very crunchy and hippie thing to do and if you don't bf, you aren't hippie enough.   I wasn't a hippie, but wasn't there a book "our bodies, ourselves" in which women were encouraged to take charge of their own bodies and not let others tell them what to do with it?

[girlysprite]

That topic is a fertile ground for many SS'es and brainhurts.
Uckily, the forum I mentioned before is very friendly. The people are all convinced that the breast should be the norm, but never judge parents who give formula - and there are a number of formula feeding parents present too who openly saod so, because the environment is the same. Bloggers like the alphaarent give me headaches though, saying loads of horrible thing about formula feeding parents.
Which reminds me of another brainhurty statement: "with todays information technology there is no excuse for a lack of kmowledge!" well, except it can still be hard to find, lots of misinformation on any topic litter your path, and sometimes people aren't even aware that they lack knowledge to negin with!

[Layla Miller]

Piratelvr1121, thank you.  I think I needed to hear that. 

Which reminds me of another brainhurty statement: "with todays information technology there is no excuse for a lack of kmowledge!" well, except it can still be hard to find, lots of misinformation on any topic litter your path, and sometimes people aren't even aware that they lack knowledge to negin with!

That definitely hurts my brain--if that were true, what would I do for work?  (I'm a librarian.)  The information may be out there, but no one is born knowing how to search it out, filter out the bad stuff, and interpret the good stuff!