A translation of last night's blunken drog

Apologies. I don't drink much or often, so when I do I have a tendency to crack myself up by attempting to type while drunk-ish. It doesn't matter what's being typed, or if it has any real reason to exist - if I can amuse myself to no end with misspellings, random punctuation marks that appear in the middle of words depsite their distance on the keyboard from the letters I meant to use, and the simple admission that "hey, I'm kinda fucked up right now!" - I will.

It's a weakness.

The story behind last night's whiskey-induced blunken drog is simple: It was the night of the company Christmas party, and as I had to re-word the assignment due that night just a wee bit and so had to leave the party early-ish, I promptly and early on took advantage of my own and the boy's one free drink ticket (that's two free drinks for me, because he rarely drinks) and then allowed myself to be convinced (without much resistance, I'll admit) to indulge in a shot of straight whiskey with the small handfull of other workers under the age of 50 (there aren't many of us, so we have to stick together). Note that my two free drinks contained whiskey as well.

I like whiskey. It makes me fell sort of fuzzy, and raises the hilarity level of simple things - like walking, and door handles.

It also makes it a wee bit hard to write, and read, but that ends up being pretty damned funny too.

Now, no tsk-tsking. I had no problems re-working that assignment (all I ended up needing to do, actually, was delete a sentence that wasn't really necessary anyway) and got it turned in on time. And I think I did a damn good job on it, to boot.

The assignment was completed before I went to the party, but with online schooling there is a thing called originality verification - a tool which compares papers and discussion board posts to those of other students' sumissions, myriad websites, and e-books to ensure students aren't cheating. To determine the level of cheating or not-cheating, this verification tool gives each assignment a similarity score from 0-100%, and anything over 25% is unaccpetable, period. My score was 26%, so some cleaning up was needed, and deleting that one sentence that contained the monetary values used in the assignment that were also used by every other student doing the assignment fixed it.

The originality verification is aggravating to those students who are not cheating, because so often good references will be used by so many others simply because they are easily found (everyone uses the textbooks given for the course as one of the two minimum required references) and are so useful, and they will be caught in the scoring. Also, some things - like key terms and ideas whose definition and discussion are the entire assignment - simply cannot be reworded, or so many students have tried different words that there are no more left that have not been used before, and so are once again caught. The same is true of numeric values needed for the assignments, which this one utilized. Every spreadsheet I created using the monetary values metioned and the excel formulas specified by the instructor match 100% those of every other student who did them as directed as well. You can't fudge numbers. So a good half of my sim score was from those spreadsheets, which have to use those exact numbers and exact formulas, or of course I'd get the whole damn thing wrong and get an F.

Aggravating, to say the least, but usually it's easily fixable. Well, words are anyway. With numbers you're either screwed because you did it right and so did everyone else, or you're screwed because you did it wrong, so you get a lower grade anyway because you're dumb.

Further, certain strings of words that are required for every individual paper are caught. What I mean is, for my school the words that absolutely must appear on the title page - "Colorado Technical University," and the class code and instructor name - are caught every damn time. Because every damn student uses those required words on their title page, every damn time. Because they're required, and no re-wording of them is allowed. We are given a report template and if papers do not use it, we lose points. So at least one "caught cheat" for every single paper assignment submitted by every single student will be the school and class information.

Lazy cheating fuckers.

Sigh.

But returning from my rant, whiskey was no obstacle to deleting the sentence that explained what the yearly monetary forecasts in this assignment were. And since those same numbers were used in every spreadsheet, explaining them in the text was not necessary, so that the loss of that sentence didn't take away from the quality of my work.

I was responsible before, during, and after my whiskey-indulgence, so all's well, and I amused myself greatly with my blunken drog. Sure, it's not really funny now, just sort of ... well, a drunken blog stating just that. But I giggled helplessly at the time.

Forgive my easily-amused nature and its antics. And drink some whiskey - it turns walking into a wildly thrilling adventure, and the act of turning one's head into a sort of personal roller-coaster, but without the throwing up and screaming (well, unless you've had too much to drink, but that's another story).