Random thoughts on my unintelligent and unsophisticated nature. Bonus being – I’m okay with that.
April 14, 2008
I spent Thursday and Friday of last week attending a training for a *really* intimidating software that does pretty much everything. Well, as far as water and sediment are concerned. Lots of scary words were used, including ‘finite difference’, 'advanced sorption', 'curvilinear grid', and 'coupling', which was used allot. However, worst of these was probably ‘contraction’ which the German engineers seemed convinced was the right word to use to describe what happens when water moves through a culvert. I was unable to convince them that the right word is ‘constriction’ and contraction is makes babies head towards the light. If this vocabulary alone doesn’t scare you, perhaps the fact that the software alone costs 94,000 euros (that is roughly 150,000 dollars for those of you still unimpressed by the power of the all mighty euro). How I got the software for free is a secret I will take with me to my grave.
The training was highly scary, as I fear that I left more confused then when I walked in the door. What we are attempting to model is in no way trivial, and the path towards an answer is abstract and comes in 3 or 4 different flavors. Furthermore, the still mysterious path towards some type of actual result involves not only actually understanding allot of what the previously mentioned schmancy vocabulary means, but also the right things to do in about 10 different intertwined software programs with pages of toggles, switches, and dimensions and such. Yup. Momma’s in a little over her head. Luckily, the folks have a big office in Bremen (about 1 hr from Hamburg) and an office packed full of over intelligent and overworked engineer types who seem happy to smush helping me into their already overpacked schedule. Um….right. If the carrot at the end of this weren’t a little jump to Australia and Vietnam, I’m not so sure I would actually have the motivation.
Since the two-day training was in Bremen and the professor I work with grew up about 20 minutes away, we spent the night at her parents house to save some driving. It was really fun to visit them (they had perhaps the most fantastic home garden I’ve ever seen), but yet another cultural difference (at least on a small scale) struck me. After dinner, her family adjourned to the living room with a bottle of wine, and sat around and talked. That’s right….talked. No television. Nobody ran off to check their email, they just sat and talked. FOR THREE HOURS. Now, I’ve experienced this phenomena before in German households before and I must say…perhaps it is my extremely infantile attention span, but this is something my family never does. Unless we are at a restaurant and thus deprived of the distracting joys of internet, the phone, the dog, other rooms to run off to, we simply don’t do this. I’d say the maximum time for which we are all actually sitting down together is generally about 20 minutes. Its not that we don’t like each other, its just without the pleasures of warm food to glue us together, we are unlikely to all sit at the table and chat for long. Plus, I think we all enjoy yelling at each other through walls and closed doors far too much. Don’t get me wrong, this behavior of actually sitting down and chatting is and far more civilized that what we normally have going, but it simply doesn’t feel right to me. I truly enjoy chatting with folks, but something about the formality of this all drives me a little batty. I get bored. I want to wiggle. Excuse me while I go watch a little Nickelodeon.
Posted byKari at 8:26 PM
Bravo to your German friends !!!! Tracy and I even bring books to dinner when it's just the 2 of us...unless it's a really fancy place