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Continued from previous post

Ten things I've done that others might not have

8) Worked for PsyCorps grading standardized tests

OMG it's a non-Africa entry!! In San Antonio, after graduating from Trinity University, I worked for a while at a company called the Psychological Corporation, abbreviated PsyCoprs, which pleases my Babylon 5 geek heart no end. It was a division of Harcourt-Brace, and you know those standardized tests that all schoolkids take? They graded them. One division just ran Scan-Trons through the readers for eight hours a day in a really mind-numbingly tedious job, but my division graded essays. I graded sixth-grade Oklahomans and L.A. highschool students. Somewhere I've got a list of amusing sentences that we culled from the essays and posted at the front of the room in order to keep from going stir-crazy. I've posted it to mailing lists before - I wouldn't be surprised if it's loose on the Net somewhere.... yes! Thank you Google! It's up here*. I'm not going to claim credit for it on the site - I did sign a nondisclosure agreement after all, and I'd rather not have my name *too* closely associated with it, even though it's been over ten years. :) So you can decide to either trust me that I provided that list, or not. ;)

* edit, as of 2016 you need to use the Wayback Machine. But if you search the web for this phrase, in quotes, you'll find a lot of places where it's been scraped and posted: "My past experiences include a part-time job as a lawnmower for half a year."

9) Had our house invaded by Siafu

Gee, Africa again, how'd you guess? Siafu, or army ants, are the carnivorous ants that you hear horror stories about. If there's organic material in their path, they eat it. They are nomadic, and travel in traditional routes. The natives in the area built their huts on these paths, and every few months when the ants come trhough, they pack up and go visit the in-laws for a few days. When they get back, their house has been cleaned of vermin, and the ants are gone. Makes perfect sense for their lifestyles, however, not for Western lifestyles. Someone had built our house right on top of one of these paths and the first night we were in Africa, our house was invaded. I remember seeing big black ants all over the kitchen. We went over to our neighbors' house (the grass people) and kipped there for a couple of nights until the ants were gone. Dad found out later that kerosene messes up the ants' chemical signals, so when he saw them coming, he'd go squirt kerosene around the base of the house and they'd leave it alone.

10) Packaged human bones for shipping

And one last non-Africa one! After my first stint in grad school, I worked in a small museum in South Dakota doing inventory. ONe of the tasks of the inventory was to get the museum in compliance with NAGPRA, which is a law to repatriate Native American grave good, sacred objects, and human remains. (It's a lot more complicated than that, but I won't go into it now.) This museum had a bunch of that sort of stuff, and two state archaeologists came down to help us sort through it all, then my coworker and I packed it up and shipped it to the state archaeological society where they could figure out where it was supposed to go and do all the hard work. So I spent a day wrapping skulls, ribs, thighbones, and so on in tissue paper and stuffing them into boxes. We wore gloves to do that, not because we were afraid of what was on the bones, but so that the oils and acids on our skins wouldn't damage the bones and objects. It was quite ... interesting to start coughing and then realize that you were coughing because you were breathing in human bone dust.

That was an interesting, aggravating job and I could do stand-up comedy on it for hours. It had been negleted for a long time and had a curator with a crazy collecting mania, so it had lots and lots of crap - some nice artifacts, but a lot of "WTF was she thinking??" stuff, too. And let me tell you, back in the collections storage area because the lights are low to preserve the objects and it's quiet and there's only you or your coworker there, it gets a bit eerie, even when you're as much of a skeptic as I am. Especially, as my coworker pointed out, when you look on a shelf that you've looked at a thousand times before and see something that you could have sworn was not there earlier. Even more especially when it's from a culture not your own. There was a small African statue that freaked out both of us once by unexpectedly looming on top of a shelving unit we were inventorying.

So much from Africa ... I've got a box of the letters Mom wrote to both sets of grandparents. One of my "One Of These Days" projects is to type them in and do ... well, something-or-other with them.

The end.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It had to freak people out when you told them you worked for PsyCorps.

And I never knew you went to Trinty. That's pretty cool.

It gives a thrill to those who know Babylon 5, and I really enjoy being able to tell people who get it that I worked for PsyCorps. :)

Yup, graduated from Trinity and lived in SA for a couple of years before heading to Denver for grad school. I've got a friend who graduated there with me who's currently the serials librarian at Trinity, and my cousin is attending and is on the Trinity football team. I can't get away from Trinity! ;)

You have done cooler things that I have. Should I do this meme, I'm really going to have to wrack my brain to come up with ten things I've done no one else probably has.

If you have one major cool experience, you can mine it for lots of cool small experiences. :) I was joking with Mom about this, and she pointed out that I could say "I ate dinner ... in the Serengeti." "I went to bed ... in the Serengeti." "I woke up ... in the Serengeti." and get cool points for that, even though they were just normal things. :)

Yeah, when I do that meme I will have to avoid a lot of "I was in a car that ran over a cow... in India."

When I started the meme, I thought I'd have to do a lot of that to make it up to ten, but once I started in on it, I began to remember other things.

Well, I came up with some things. They're not OMG Awesome and most were under the age of ten, but they work.

Nah, they're pretty cool. A lot of them were things you /did/, while mine were just about all things that I happened to be present for and didn't cause or contribute to them. They were just OMG COOL because I happened to be in Africa at the time. :)

I loved those essay excerpts.

Thanks! :) I do intend to transcribe my mom's letters one day, and sit and talk with her about it. The original impulse behind it when I started in 2002 was to type them up and scan in some of our pictures and have a website on it, but I've gotten some feedback from random people that are starting to make me think maybe they're actually interesting to someone who *wasn't* directly involved or related to us, so ... well, there's a lot of decent material there. Hm.

You worked for PsyCorp? Wow *stares of geeky admiration* Good old Babylon 5 :)

All of these Africa entries combined with the last one with the eerie bone place reminds me of a Young Adult story I once read about a cursed (leopard) fur coat which was found by a young girl when her family inherited a castle. It was a pretty terrible story, but creepy because the coat would malevolently skulk around on its own and was trying to kill the girl... The thought of a coat slithering around the floor by itself is scarier than it first seems :D

But I'm waffling now, I've drunk too much sugar along with my E numbers ^_^

XD Yeah, getting to say I worked for PsyCorp is indeed a pleasure, almost worth the mind-numbing boredom and low pay.

The bones and statue weren't even the most disturbing thing about that museum. It had a baby in a jar. Six-month human fetus from a scientific specimen supply house sometime in the 1940s. AUGH! Anyway, we were on the cmapus of a univresity with a med school, and we got the guy who ran the medical-specimen disposal unit to come and get it. Eesh. *shudder*

Ick! That's just... Disgusting and weird. Are you sure it wasn't an alien baby in a jar? From a lifetime of sci-fi worship I'm led to believe that's all you find in creepy storehouses. Unless you're watching Stargate, then it's usually been irridated to combat a mind altering virus planted by a an alien race who then helpfully left some artifacts with detailed inscriptions on how to beat it lying around for any passing linguist/ physics major.

Might have been, come to think of it. I think it was anencephalic so that was slightly easier to deal with than a fetus that looked normal that we couldnt' tell what it died from. But still ... ick!