Beware Geeks Bearing Grifts

So, we had our Back To School night tonight at the college. All the faculty was on hand to welcome back students from their spring break. It was a lot of fun catching up with my students, most of whom seem to be following me from one class to the next in succession. I guess I was just meant to herd this particular group through to the end and send them on their way at graduation into the cold, cruel world.

Anyways, the college ordered an Imperial Fuck-Ton of pizza for tonight's soiree. By that, I mean four full-length tables piled five to seven pies deep end to end. Yeah, much more than a mere Metric Fuck-Ton. We had enough left over to send whole pies home with late-coming students who were initially worried they'd miss out on the comestibles only to find themselves hitting the mother lode.

As we were divvying up the remains, several of my students were still there talking with us and waiting to see if they were going to be bidden to the take-home feast. At which point, I picked up one of the sausage pies and spoke loudly to the group,

Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away!

How proud I was that every single one of my students got the reference, much to the consternation of most of the faculty who had no idea what we were giggling about. Some even recited the OSI model right back to me in correct form.

Looks like it's gonna be a good year after all.

Language Barriers

As a parent, you sometimes have to decide which is better: to step in and fix a problem for your children or give them the tools they need to fix it themselves and step back out of the way.

My daughter was messing around with the settings on her phone last night and managed to change the default language. After punching a bunch of buttons to no avail, other than having the phone splutter out a long string of Español, she brought the phone to me with the expectations that I'd fix it for her.

I handed her an English-Español dictionary and left her to fix it herself. As an extra bit of motivation, I told her that if she didn't fix it, all of her text messages would be sent out in Spanish and no one would be able to read them. (Yeah, I know. I'm bad.)

Eventually, after a long struggle with the nuances of conjugating Spanish verbs, she figured it out, and her phone is now speaking the Queen's English right and proper.