Thursday, February 25, 2010

Data, data, data

Inputing data collected from the surveys is boring, tedious and extremely frustrating.

Especially when your eyes feel like packed sand and your head weighted with a bag of lead.


I know.

I'm living it now.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Survey-ing

I had to go house to house today asking ppl 50+ questions about their family, house, and breastfeeding practises.

I will never abuse those survey ppl ever again. I respect and symphatize with that lot.

Imagine:

1) you look at the 50+ questions you need to ask ppl who you have to knock loudly on their doors to interrupt them in whatever they were doing and pray despairingly that they won't throw dirty water at you once they answer the door.

2) you arrive at the designated site, where it's unbelievably dirty, dark, and altogether suspicious. Even refugee camps look cleaner.

3) no one answers your prolonged knocking and yelling for about 15 consecutive units that are cluttered worse than three landfills.

4) the unit, which had lots of noise inside before, falls silent once you knock and inquire, with that silence stretching.... till there's a click as the door is locked. Yeah, we wouldn't know you just locked the door in our faces right? After all, we're standing just right outside it.

5) the hot, hot, hot, hot, sun.

6) we're not getting paid for this. At all.

7) you make us wait and wait and wait outside your tastelessly ornate and frail-looking gate, under the freaking blasting sun, acting like no one's home when we already saw you scramble behind the sofa through your open front door when you heard the doorbell. Smooth move, jerk.

Sigh.

However, you do get some nice, beautiful(in my eyes, as they were nice to us miserable ppl) friendly ppl, who took the time to let us ask them meaningless and random questions.

Two, a Malay couple with their youngest daughter and an Indian housewife, even invited us in to sit while we did our survey. I cannot express how deeply grateful and thankful I am to those ppl who didn't mind indulging us with a lil' silver of their time.

And I'm also grateful to those who at least answered their door to decline, rather than leave us hanging and hollering outside like demented, hot, sweating hooligans.

See? It doesn't take much to make someone's day a bit nicer.

At one point, we got so desperate, we even interviewed an 8 year old boy, as he was home alone. We stood outside his house gate and quickly asked him. At that point, we were that desperate to finish out allotted 35 slips of questionnaires.

And there was a house with a beagle-like dog who is a damn coward. All bark, no bite. Started barking when we approached the house while the occupant dived behind the sofa. Continued barking in a bored, repetitive way... like it's saying, " Look, since I've nothing better to do, I'll just bark at you once every 3 seconds, you know, just to show that I'm a guard dog, who you know, guards, and... where is my idiot master? *rolls eyes*" All this.... at a distance. XD XD

When we started walking away, it inched closer and came right to the gate, still woofing away of course... and backed away when we turned around. It's like, it must have a specific amount of distance between it and us. We tested it. It backed away, matching every step we took forward with one back. I'm surprised it isn't marigold yellow and the house isn't robbed blind.

Anyways, we finished our allotted slips, along with everyone else... but still have to go again tomorrow because of the irritating, do-by-the-book lecturer assigned to us. She's new, and not growing much in popularity among my group. Fussed so much on our questionnaire.

So, those who read this, thanks. This is one of my rare, long, word-filled posts.

And please, please be nice to those students who come and do house-to-house surveys.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Back Again

Today's the first day of classes.

I'm not so happy about that.

Rather, I'm glad about something else.

Been wanting to slake my 'thirst' for quite some time now.

So, guardian angel of mine...

"How much longer?"

And oh, I finally watched New Moon. At night. (Imagine the ensuing dream I had that night. XD) Dvd, but it stutters slightly on my lappie. It was interesting... Poor Jacob.

He's damn hawt. XD

Whee~



----edit-------------------------------------------
Oooh. Angel, you work fast.