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I hate modern cell phones!

The instructor I mentioned was one who took a physical ruler and measured the margins of the papers. If they were so much as an eighth of an inch out, she'd dock marks. I told the students that the paper only fit into my printer a certain way, and I couldn't make the same precise physical adjustments that I could have if I was still using my old typewriter - and if she didn't believe that, they were free to give her my number and I'd tell her that it wasn't fair to dock marks for something beyond anyone's control. When you specify a particular size font and a specific margin for the computer and printer to do, you take what you get - or so it was 20+ years ago when I was using an Amiga 500 and a laser printer.
I remember (my fault) for leaving a paper to the last minute to transcribe. Unfortunately I had my lower wisdom teeth surgically removed (impacted) that day. I looked like I had been run over by a bus when I handed in the paper. Doh .. did a two-sided page. Instant fail.
 
Yikes.

I had one of my wisdom teeth removed, and when I got home I told my grandmother I was going to bed. Maybe half an hour later, one of my regulars showed up, insisting that she just had to have her resume and cover letter typed NOW (some of them didn't bother phoning to book an appointment - they figured that since I was always home, they could drop in any time and expect to get things done). My grandmother tried to tell her I wasn't well, but I figured that a job was a job, and at least it wouldn't take long.
 
In college I got sick of trying to come up with interesting titles for my papers, and, inspired by the writings of certain Cold War era figures, I just started to name all my papers "Regarding [fill in the blank]" or "On [fill in the blank]."

Kor
 
One of my social work clients started calling her assignments "Essay #1" , "Essay #2", and so on. She was one of the ones who asked me to choose a title for it and I said no.
 
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And in this day an age, what situation would lead to someone placing a collect call?
Or if your phone has fallen into water (be it an ocean, a swimming pool, or a urinal), or if you've been mugged, or if you do not have the phone on your person while out in a car that simply won't go any further, or, or, or ...

I once had to call my bank, from a foreign country (England), in order to have them send me some money. My sister called grandma from Italy for the same reason at another time.
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If I'm outside of my home town, I absolutely cannot get around without a smartphone, for navigation, for last minute double checking to make sure places I'm going to are open, etc.

Kor
 
If I'm outside of my home town, I absolutely cannot get around without a smartphone, for navigation, for last minute double checking to make sure places I'm going to are open, etc.

Kor
Agreed. I often have my navigation on even if I know where I'm going to see traffic and for possible alternate routes.
 
I love smartphones and all the apps. (owner of a Samsung Galaxy A5 2017 and a very cheap Nokia)
At first I was anti- text (why would anyone want to do that, its quicker to call), anti- camera (what's wrong with buying a proper camera), anti- apps (why spend time playing games, why would I want to do my banking, shopping, booking hotel rooms etc on a phone, what if I lose it?)
Now I do all of the above.. and more! :lol:
The only thing I still refuse to do is watch movies or tv, can't stand the small screen.
 
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At first I was anti- text (why would anyone want to do that, its quicker to call)
I saw it as the perfection of the phone; never again would I have to be interrupted in whatever I was doing and tend to someone elses problems, I could just wait til I had the time to read their message and react to it in my own good time.
Plus there wasn't all this messy waste of time with hellos and how-are-yous and whatnot (while you had to excuse yourself from whatever company you were in and have one arm tied up by holding the darn device).
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[FONT=UICTFontTextStyleBody]I saw it as the perfection of the phone; never again would I have to be interrupted in whatever I was doing and tend to someone elses problems, I could just wait til I had the time to read their message and react to it in my own good time.
Plus there wasn't all this messy waste of time with hellos and how-are-yous and whatnot (while you had to excuse yourself from whatever company you were in and have one arm tied up by holding the darn device).
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I think it depends on the conversation you need to have. If all I'm saying is "hey can you get some milk on your way home" or "leaving now be there in 20 minutes" then a quick text is perfect.
 
Yeah I don't get that myself. What's the urgency or attraction for watching TV or movies on a crappy mobile screen?

Unless we had phones with nanotech where the screen could expand well I will say no thanks.......
 
Your teacher was incorrect, and you should have challenged that mark. Yes, quotations are always supposed to be exact, although if the original contains a spelling error, the proper thing to do is include "[sic]" right after, to indicate that you know it's misspelled.

In your case, however, it wasn't a misspelling, and the teacher was wrong. She should not have docked you for that.


I had a junior high teacher who got visibly upset with me in class for challenging her for saying I'd made mistakes in an essay. I remember writing, "the trees lose their leaves" (referring to leaves falling from the trees in autumn) and she corrected it to "loose."

Well, that's obviously ridiculous. The tree has no conscious decision in this; the leaves are lost no matter what the tree might prefer. So I challenged her, and she muttered sarcastically, "I should have known you never make mistakes."

Funny what a person remembers, 40 years later. That wasn't the only argument we ever had, or the dumbest. She docked me marks for capitalizing "Earth." Since I'd chosen the solar system as the subject for my assignment, of course I capitalized Earth (back in those days I'd just discovered Star Trek and a renewed interest in astronomy, so I was working space-related themes into as many assignments as possible).

I asked her why she had docked marks for that, when she hadn't docked marks for capitalizing "Saturn."

"Well, Saturn is a planet," she told me, as though it was the most obvious reason ever.

"So is Earth," I told her.

This all played out in class in front of the other students, and if looks could kill I'd have become a puddle of goo right then and there. That teacher did not like to be challenged.

My 8th grade science teacher asked us to name the states of matter. I mentioned plasma, and he said that was just science fiction and not real. It's particularly funny because my answer showed up in a state-mandated exam at the end of the year, and everybody else would have gotten the question wrong if they believed the teacher.
 
My 8th grade science teacher asked us to name the states of matter. I mentioned plasma, and he said that was just science fiction and not real. It's particularly funny because my answer showed up in a state-mandated exam at the end of the year, and everybody else would have gotten the question wrong if they believed the teacher.

Our geography teacher changed his mind about what the capital of Iceland was every week. I never changed my answer on his pop quizzes but one week it would be right, the next not,:(
 
I read another anecdote somewhere about a math teacher who thought that a student made up the term "googolplex." Where do these teachers learn their stuff? :rolleyes:

Kor
 
True. But so often it seems that they only learn the stuff up to the grade level that they are teaching themselves, rather than becoming experts in the subjects that they teach. And then if a student finds out something beyond that grade level, the teacher insists that it's some made-up nonsense. :wtf:

Kor
 
I think we can all think of times when teachers were misinformed.
I have a story of the opposite. My little brother was supposed to write plants that grow in our home state. To help the children, the teacher said they should think of tea. In our family, my uncle made his own tea, collecting all kinds of herbs. It had a phantasy name, which was combined from his name and village where he lived.

So my brother wrote that Sipromi is a plant. The teacher, even though she never had heard of it, could not prove otherwise and gave him the point ;)
 
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