I know I’ve said it quite a few times and you probably don’t really care to hear it again, but it’s been a really long 3 weeks. Nothing terribly exciting or worth talking about, but just a lot of extended shifts and holiday coverage (you silly state-side Americans, taking President’s Day off). Saturday has finally rolled around and I’m.. Well.. Drinking coffee at home while reading up on Microsoft Excel functions and studying kanji. I plan to take a kanji proficiency test later this year (the test is in June), so I’ve been working on studying for that in my free time. Unlike other studying, kanji is just one of those things you can only really memorize through raw repetition. If you want to study Japanese, I recommend investing in some good pencils.<\/p>\n
The Excel stuff? Well, my job involves a lot of work with the Microsoft Office suite (mainly Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) and though I have a passable understanding of Excel, I’ve never been one to settle for passable. Generally, Google is there to save you when things go wrong (you’d be amazed how many last minute filings for court cases are saved by a Google search), but I’d rather just know how to do things rather than look. Ounce of prevention, pound of cure. That sort of thing.<\/p>\n
One of the things I’ve always found interesting through my rather varied work history is learning the language specific to the jobs\/industry. I’ve worked in IT, I’ve worked in back room and floor product stocking (back from my Target days and Home Depot overnight jobs), I’ve worked as an educator in private and public schools, and I now work in the legal field. How I’ve ended up here is a mystery even to me, but each step on the way has been interesting (if not always entirely enjoyable).<\/p>\n
Anyone who has worked in product stocking will tell you the horrors about go-backs<\/em> and the hassle of facing<\/em>. A reset<\/em> is a pure hassle and shares nothing with the true meaning of the word (it’s where you move an entire section of a store to another place to refresh the image of the store).<\/p>\n In the education arena, you frequently are taking subjective things (language ability) and making them objective. This is done through scores, tests, and other assessment procedures. What’s the difference between an “upper beginner” and a “lower intermediate”? I can’t tell you in words, but I could talk to a class for 10 minutes and tell you which group an individual should go into.<\/p>\n Nowadays, my life is filled with running redlines<\/em>\/blacklines<\/em>\/comparites<\/em>, markups<\/em>, and the joys of TOCs<\/em> and TOAs<\/em>. The first one is essentially a comparison between two documents. If you have a draft of a contract and then get an updated draft, you really don’t want to read the whole thing again. By doing this, you can see at a glance what has been removed, added, or deleted between drafts. I hear that back in the day this was done manually with someone reading both documents line by line, word by word, and drawing lines to indicate removals and additions (which is where the name redline<\/em> comes from). We use software now to analyze and create these comparisons.<\/p>\n A markup<\/em> is basically a printed document that has edits\/additions to be reflected in the digital copy. Remember: I mark up<\/strong> a markup<\/em>. Verbs and nouns, kids.. Very important. The act of acting upon these markups<\/em> is varied and a could be described as keyboarding<\/em> (lots of typing), reflecting<\/em>\/performing<\/em> the edits, etc.<\/p>\n A TOC<\/em> is, as I’m sure you all know, a Table of Contents. But what is a TOA<\/em>? It’s a Table of Authorities, basically a list of every legal precedent the attorney has referenced in the document and the page number. Jason! v.<\/em> Tuesday, etc.<\/p>\n To be completely honest, though I’ve always been interested in the legal profession, I admit that I knew basically nothing of what it involved outside of Law and Order before working here. I hate to say it, but Law and Order (though still a good show) has as much to do with court cases as CHiPs does with law enforcement. It’s interesting and I’ve had a lot of fun, but it’s definitely a lot of now<\/strong> work and juggling.<\/p>\n Huh… Seems like all I do is talk about work.<\/p>\n As far as my personal life goes, I’ll be taking vacation next week to go across Japan to where I used to live in Yamaguchi prefecture. My ex-high school students will be graduating and moving on with their lives to go to universities or enter the work force, so I’m going back to attend the graduation. It’ll be nice to see the people I worked with and taught for 3+ years and to take a few days off work.<\/p>\n I’ll be sure to put some photos up next week! But for now, I should get back to my studying. After that, I think I’ll make a run to the grocery store (yes, at midnight) and see if I can’t find some ingredients for fudge. I’ve never made fudge before, and that’s a tragedy.<\/p>\n Back to kanji!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I know I’ve said it quite a few times and you probably don’t really care to hear it again, but it’s been a really long 3 weeks. Nothing terribly exciting or worth talking about, but just a lot of extended shifts and holiday coverage (you silly state-side Americans, taking President’s Day off). Saturday has finally rolled around and I’m.. Well.. Drinking coffee at home while reading up on Microsoft Excel functions and studying kanji. I plan to take a kanji proficiency test later this year (the test is in June), so I’ve been working on studying for that in . . . → Read More: Saturday Night (Fever?)<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jrem.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}