Now it’s personal.
Last night I woke up around 2 am and got up to turn off the fan, and when I went back to my bed, I realized it still wasn’t completely quiet in my room: I could hear chewing. Using the faint light from my alarm clock as a flashlight, I got up and walked in the direction of the sound until I got to the bookshelves. I could see my can of honey-roasted peanuts, and I could see that the lid was almost completely chewed off.
You have to understand, I brought honey-roasted peanuts on my past two trips to Nicaragua, and they kept me sane when I needed a taste of home. Last night, I felt that peanuts were in order, so I opened the freshness seal and ate a few nuts. Then I put the lid back on, confident that it could withstand the gnawing of mice. But I was wrong. They violated my peanuts! It’s ridiculous that the peanuts should mean any more to me than, say, the cookies that the mice ate the other day, but these peanuts were my safety blanket.
I hung the can of peanuts from the clothesline in my room so that the mice couldn’t get any more fun out of it, and then I tried to go back to sleep. But I could still hear them, and they weren’t just on the roof or in the kitchen, they were in my room, crawling around on my things. I could hear my plastic bags crinkling, and I knew I would find mouse feces covering my books in the morning. I heard a skittering noise on my duffel bag, about a foot away from my head. Finally, I gave up. I decided that if I couldn’t sleep, at least I could keep the mice away from my stuff. I turned the light on and kept watch for the rest of the night, scaring off all the mice that dared show their little faces. It did make me realize how impossible it would be to mouse-proof the room, after seeing a mouse easily squeeze through a crack no more than half an inch wide.
By 5:30, I hadn’t seen any mice in a while, and it was too late to go back to sleep, so I decided to quit my vigil and go take a shower. Unfortunately, I managed to catch the cockroaches at their most active, and the shower stall at its darkest. The day is not off to a good start.
The good news is that the little blue poison pellets that I put out in my room have been disappearing little by little. That means that somewhere, a mouse is dying because of me. And that makes me happy.
(what kind of diseases can you get from mice?)
This blog is mostly not going to be about what I’m doing to earn credit from Olin, but I am going to write a little bit about what I’m doing/not doing.
I feel rudderless. I don’t know what to do, and I guess I’m waiting for guidance from my professors. I know that by applying for an Away experience, I was indicating that I could study on my own, somewhat independently, but right now I don’t feel capable of that. I should be talking to my “users”; the engineers in the Grupo Fenix office, learning about them so that I can design an appropriate database. But really, how much patience would you have with some kid who came into your workplace, who barely spoke your language, and asked you to devote copious amounts of time to talking to her (slowly, and repeating things often), all in the name of some bizarre, foreign “design process”? I barely feel comfortable asking where the light switch is; how can I possibly ask these very busy people to indulge me by submitting to a bunch of interviews? I know that the purpose of the design process is to understand the users such that a useful product results, but right now, I don’t feel like going that route. Elieneth has told me basically what the database will be used for, so all I need is to decide on specific fields for the forms, and just DO it. I’d be interested in looking at some human/computer interaction stuff from Lynn, to help develop a user interface for the database, but other than that, I’m ready to skip the design process altogether.
And what about the ethnographic study of the office environment? If I can’t ask people to give me their time in furtherance of something that will theoretically benefit them (the database), how can I ask them to answer my questions in their free time just so I can write about the office culture? What was I thinking? How was this supposed to work?
In hindsight, I think I should have started my Away experience at least several weeks earlier than the regular semester, so I wouldn’t feel pressure to be working an Olin-worthy course load while I’m still adjusting to living in Nicaragua. And I’m NOT working an Olin-worthy course load right now. I have a lot of leisure/boredom time, and I’m not exactly sure what I should be doing. For sure, even if I had plenty things to do, these still wouldn’t be ideal conditions for working.
Comments