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robotech_masterWell, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
compassrose proceeds apace. Tonight we had a rather productive chat session amid players from three of the four Chancels, in which two of them got together and worked out an issue which would affect both of them, and they and the others spent some time shooting the breeze among themselves afterward. It's going remarkably well, though I have to agree with the fellow who said we need some kind of a "cheat sheet" just so we can match up players, LJ names, e-mails, and (once they're all revealed) character names/Estates. Twenty players, four Chancels...has anything this ambitious ever been done with Nobilis? Even in playtesting?
But I'm sure you're all tired of me going off on Nobilis all the time. So I'll talk about a couple of things that happened to me recently.
For one thing, yesterday I had to take some training at my store. Just the usual thing, where they have new training computers and want to be absolutely certain that all associates have been run through certain portions. In this case, it was the drugs, alcohol, and firearms sales policies. (Gee, I've only worked there three years...) But the training itself wasn't the worst. It was the way in which it was packaged.
Not content to give us a simple question-and-answer quiz, the training software designers, in their infinite wisdom, put together one of the more intelligence-insulting things I've yet seen. It looks like a little board game, where you roll a die and move a token around a track. The funny thing is, other people were training with and after me, and they all got the exact same questions in the exact same order. Yes, that's right...it's all a sham, a way of cutesifying the training so that the bubbleheads with the 70 IQs can "get it."
After that, there were a couple of videos that had been shown at a meeting earlier, which I had not been able to attend. One of them was the usual safety-first thing that we all have to see every so often...but the other one was more interesting. It was raw security camera footage of a shortchange artist working service desks and cash registers. (There was a hand-out that explained what was going on; if I'd made the meeting, I would have heard our Security person narrate it, but I got a sufficient understanding.) It was quite a thing to watch. They were all the same guy--a black fellow in his 20s, with glasses. The fellow would get a bill handed to him, and then stuff it under his shirt when the clerk wasn't looking and hand back another one, saying they gave him the wrong bill. I mean, he didn't even do any fancy sleight of hand or anything, he just stuffed it under his shirt! And later on, when he worked the cash register, it was really a sight to see. He'd get a bill, would hand it back, the cashier would hand him more bills, he'd hand more bills back...and the process would repeat. For several minutes. While customers standing in line behind the guy were getting antsy. In one case, the cashier actually had his till out and on the counter...and his managers and supervisors walked right by, several times, without even noticing anything was wrong!
I tell you what, you think that there's no way someone like that could put one over on you...you tell yourself you're way too smart for that...and yet, watching people get taken so easily like this, you find yourself wondering if it really could happen to you. Scary.
Today, I got a parcel from France; it included payment for the Harry Potter puzzle I auctioned off a few weeks ago...and part of that payment, as I had specified, was a French 1-Euro coin. It's funny...I'd expected it would be bigger, somehow, like a SBA/Sac dollar. Instead, it seems to be the same size as a quarter, or perhaps a little smaller, yet a little thicker than a nickel. Quite spiffy-looking, though. This is gonna be my new lucky piece, to replace the Argentinian Peso I used to have but lost.
Well, the brother's wedding approaches, and the getting-ready proceeds apace. Tomorrow, I do the laundry...or at least enough of it to give me clean clothes for the St. Louis trip...and hope we can wrap up all the Chancel stuff in time for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mgrasso's deadline.
compassrose proceeds apace. Tonight we had a rather productive chat session amid players from three of the four Chancels, in which two of them got together and worked out an issue which would affect both of them, and they and the others spent some time shooting the breeze among themselves afterward. It's going remarkably well, though I have to agree with the fellow who said we need some kind of a "cheat sheet" just so we can match up players, LJ names, e-mails, and (once they're all revealed) character names/Estates. Twenty players, four Chancels...has anything this ambitious ever been done with Nobilis? Even in playtesting?But I'm sure you're all tired of me going off on Nobilis all the time. So I'll talk about a couple of things that happened to me recently.
For one thing, yesterday I had to take some training at my store. Just the usual thing, where they have new training computers and want to be absolutely certain that all associates have been run through certain portions. In this case, it was the drugs, alcohol, and firearms sales policies. (Gee, I've only worked there three years...) But the training itself wasn't the worst. It was the way in which it was packaged.
Not content to give us a simple question-and-answer quiz, the training software designers, in their infinite wisdom, put together one of the more intelligence-insulting things I've yet seen. It looks like a little board game, where you roll a die and move a token around a track. The funny thing is, other people were training with and after me, and they all got the exact same questions in the exact same order. Yes, that's right...it's all a sham, a way of cutesifying the training so that the bubbleheads with the 70 IQs can "get it."
After that, there were a couple of videos that had been shown at a meeting earlier, which I had not been able to attend. One of them was the usual safety-first thing that we all have to see every so often...but the other one was more interesting. It was raw security camera footage of a shortchange artist working service desks and cash registers. (There was a hand-out that explained what was going on; if I'd made the meeting, I would have heard our Security person narrate it, but I got a sufficient understanding.) It was quite a thing to watch. They were all the same guy--a black fellow in his 20s, with glasses. The fellow would get a bill handed to him, and then stuff it under his shirt when the clerk wasn't looking and hand back another one, saying they gave him the wrong bill. I mean, he didn't even do any fancy sleight of hand or anything, he just stuffed it under his shirt! And later on, when he worked the cash register, it was really a sight to see. He'd get a bill, would hand it back, the cashier would hand him more bills, he'd hand more bills back...and the process would repeat. For several minutes. While customers standing in line behind the guy were getting antsy. In one case, the cashier actually had his till out and on the counter...and his managers and supervisors walked right by, several times, without even noticing anything was wrong!
I tell you what, you think that there's no way someone like that could put one over on you...you tell yourself you're way too smart for that...and yet, watching people get taken so easily like this, you find yourself wondering if it really could happen to you. Scary.
Today, I got a parcel from France; it included payment for the Harry Potter puzzle I auctioned off a few weeks ago...and part of that payment, as I had specified, was a French 1-Euro coin. It's funny...I'd expected it would be bigger, somehow, like a SBA/Sac dollar. Instead, it seems to be the same size as a quarter, or perhaps a little smaller, yet a little thicker than a nickel. Quite spiffy-looking, though. This is gonna be my new lucky piece, to replace the Argentinian Peso I used to have but lost.
Well, the brother's wedding approaches, and the getting-ready proceeds apace. Tomorrow, I do the laundry...or at least enough of it to give me clean clothes for the St. Louis trip...and hope we can wrap up all the Chancel stuff in time for
mgrasso's deadline.