madeofwynn.net

I just registered the other blog at madeofwynn.net! Unfortunately, the site will be down while the domain becomes globally visible (so tech support tells me). Sorry for the delay, but hopefully it’ll be back up quickly!

Announcing a New Blog

Regular readers have probably gotten very disappointed in me over the past three months. I haven’t been updating since I haven’t had many job interviews or insights, so all post ideas that I have are just whiny or self-degrading. You don’t come to this blog to read that sort of rubbish, so I’ve thought it better to keep silent rather than produce poor content.

That’s why I’m starting a new blog (or rather, adding a new section to an even more sparsely updated blog). You all met my nonexistent patron who will be funding my nonexistent PhD program at a prestigious university to which I have not applied. The new blog, Made of Ƿ (Made of Wynn), was originally for book-related thoughts, especially as related to medieval literature. The new section, Dear Patron, will be a series of letters to keep my patron updated on my progress in studying and pursuing a career as a freelancing medievalist. The content is more specialized than Why Can’t I Find a Job?, but I only have one sense of humor, so I hope that you all will enjoy that one as much as you have (hopefully) enjoyed this one.

Why Can’t I Find a Job? will continue to be updated as the job market continues to be ridiculous. I’m not abandoning it, but since story fodder is sparse, I need another source for material. Relevant posts will be cross-posted to both blogs.

If you have your own stories about strange job interviews, now is the time to start sending them in!

Useful Fridays: Community Service

While looking for work, it’s good to do something to improve oneself (something more than improving one’s Wii coordination, which I have done much of since the release of Skyward Sword). A common option for improvement is to pursue more education, but community service is also a good plan.

Community Service Hours – Why the Heck Do I Care Anyway? is geared for students, but Dominique Jordan gives advice that’s sound for everyone. First, Jordan recognizes the importance of employment experience, hard work, and a good education. This makes it easier to see how community service rounds out the experience. Jordan argues that community service shows that an applicant is ” compassionate, trustworthy, organized, and [has] something to offer.” It shows passion for a good cause. Jordan also explains that finding community service opportunities relevant to one’s field can help a job-seeker gain more experience in the field while confirming his passion for that type of work (or perhaps the opposite, which will let a job-seeker know that this is the wrong type of work for him).

In this Q&A on LinkedIn, a user has asked whether or not community service is relevant for people who have finished school. Responses vary as to whether or not hiring managers in a certain field will care about work outside that field, but all agree that community service is an excellent way to spend one’s time.

In Job Searching? 5 Things to Do While You’re Looking, James Alexander also lauds the experience of community service while unemployed. He says that “volunteering may give you the chance to figure out what direction you really want to pursue, and what you’d rather leave to more experienced professionals.”

You can see how people who want to be doctors, lawyers, or teachers could gain much experience from their community service. The same is true for medievalists. For the past few months, I’ve been working with the poor souls who just don’t have the experience to engage in the Cotton Nero A.x, argue about the effectiveness of chain mail, or debate the height of a Norwegian knight. (Okay, I’ve been practice-lecturing a friend who wants his PhD in medieval history. He’s been great for my career preparation because work has been really slow, so he gives me lots of practice in everything from Anglo-Saxon grammar to bashing Sir Tristan.)

If you’re thinking that this doesn’t count as community service, you’re right.  It’s a productive way to kill time, but it doesn’t exactly serve the whole community. Craigslist doesn’t exactly have a nonprofit medievalism page. I’ve begun looking for opportunities related to my field. Possible opportunities that I should pursue are organizations that offer free tutoring services for low-income members of the community who want to get their GEDs or enter college. If I’m not getting paid to work, then I should put as much effort as possible into helping my community. (You can tell that I’m trying to get myself geared up. New experiences are always tough to begin.)

Now, on another note, this week’s distraction is everyone’s most people’s favorite Doctor preparing the toddlers of the UK for Christmas. It’s a bit early, but I’m excited:

MMOs and the Work Environment

In the MMO Rift, I recently hit level 50, which is the highest level that a player can currently reach. I am celebrating. This is the first time I have hit the level cap in an MMO before. Does this mean I’ve beaten the game? Nope. The real fun is just beginning.

Anyway, MMO is short for MMORPG, which is short for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. MMOs are adventure-type computer games that are played online with thousands of people. Aside from purchasing the game, one must also purchase monthly subscriptions to play. That may sound like a rip-off until you realize that the game NEVER ENDS. (Okay, I’m exaggerating, but it can take years to do everything there is to do in these games.)

Just go with it for a minute. I promise I really can make MMOs match up with the work environment.

In MMOs, there are many parts of the game that one simply cannot do alone. One must form a temporary group of players. Each player will have a specific job to do, and that job will fall into one of four categories:

• Tank: This player will usually have the strongest armor, thus the saying “Clank, clank, I’m a tank.” The tank forces all the enemies to attack him and him alone. If someone in the group is going to die, the most likely candidate is the tank. If the tank dies, the rest of the group will probably follow shortly.
• Healer: This player’s job is to stay back away from the enemies and heal the tank so that the tank doesn’t die. If necessary, the healer will heal the other players too, but the tank comes first. If the healer dies, the tank will probably die shortly afterward. I’ve found that healing tends to be the least popular role.
• DPS, or Damage Per Second: DPS players will usually specialize either in attacking from afar or sneaking up close and attacking at close distances. Either way, this is the glory role. The DPS kills enemies as fast as possible. I’ve found that DPS tends to be the most popular role.
• Support: Support players are the jacks-of-all-trades. Their main job is usually to supply buffs (things that make your allies stronger) and debuffs (things that make your enemies weaker), but are most effective when they can also provide crowd control (usually in the form of stunning enemies), emergency backup healing, and/or emergency backup tanking.

MMO DPS

In an office or business-type situation, one can often find the same dynamics.

• Tank: The Office Tank is the strong-willed coworker who’s not afraid to put his foot down and get things done. He’s the one you call on to take care of unruly customers. He’s the one who can actually lift that big jug of water for the water cooler.
• Healer: The Office Healer takes on the jobs that make other people’s jobs go more smoothly. She organizes the paperwork in a way that makes sense and brings in cookies during stressful times of the year.
• DPS: The glory job, therefore, the boss. The Office DPS is the mover and shaker of the group.
• Support: The Office Support takes care of all those little behind-the-scenes jobs that nobody notices. The Office Support refills the stapler, empties the trash, and cleans off the food stuck to the microwave.

Office DPS

Rift has a unique aspect to it—at random times, holes between dimensions open up and enemies come pouring out. Players in the vicinity are automatically put into a group to fight the new enemies off. This requires you to know what your role in a group is and fall into it immediately. Sometimes you’re put in a well-rounded group, in which case it’s a breeze to clean up all the monsters. However, I usually find that I (healer) am the only one in the group who isn’t playing DPS. Sometimes it still works out—until you get to the really big monster at the end that can kill you in two hits. Then everyone takes damage faster than I can heal it, and we all die. If only we had a tank.

Similarly, I’ve been in work-type environments where more than one person was trying to be the boss. Disagreements abounded and the employees got stuck in the middle. I never knew just how many lime wedges were supposed to go on the pad thai. I never knew when I was going to be made to work later than scheduled because they couldn’t get it together to tell me. By the end I was never even sure what time the restaurant closed. The result? The restaurant was losing money, and not only did I stop working there, I stopped eating there.

In a balanced MMO group, each person still has to do his job for the group to be successful. I usually play a healer, but sometimes I play support. One day I did a dungeon with a group where nobody paid attention to what was happening to the other members of the group. I was playing support with limited ability to tank and heal. At one point the other players actually stood there and watched a monster I couldn’t handle on my own kill me. At another point the healer didn’t stay in the back like he was supposed to and died. Therefore the tank died seconds later, leaving me and two very lightly armored (read: easy to kill) DPS players. Since I was paying attention to what was happening to the other players, I kicked into emergency backup tanking mode and made the remaining monsters attack me so that the DPS players could kill them. I had just enough ability to heal myself so that the three of us survived.

I once worked Office Support at a tea shop. We had bins of supplies that went to trade shows with us. They were very disorganized and had to be re-packed every time we went somewhere.  To save time and confusion, before putting them in storage one day I made a list of the contents of each bin that went at the top of the bin. One day the Office DPS (boss) needed an item from one of the bins. He had already taken everything out of all the bins and mixed it all up by the time he noticed the lists on top. The organizing had to be redone again, and we wasted a lot of time that day. Even after I quit that job, I sometimes got phone calls from the Office DPS asking where I had put something away (even though I labeled the boxes) because he just hadn’t paid attention.

Have I given this too much thought? Maybe. Is this a desperate attempt to link my video game habit with something more useful? You bet. Nevertheless, if everyone knows what their roles are at work (even if they don’t fit exactly into these four categories) things will go much more smoothly—especially when the stress hits.

All hail the level 50 healer!

Time Travel?

Yesterday, I had no students at my part-time tutoring job, so I was reading Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside. I was on the essays about whether time travel would be logically possible, drawing on General Relativity and a number of theories about the nature of time (I admit that I skipped all of the chapters in the book using Kant and Nietzsche). As I was reading, a student came in for help citing a Bedford reader with a copyright date of 2012.

I’m not making this up. I haven’t been this startled since I was reading Ring and my new TV kept flickering.

A copyright date 1 year in the future? I suppose there are some kind of legal advantages to it, but it makes MLA format difficult. The book must be cited with 2012 as the publication date, which is technically correct and incorrect at the same time. The student probably isn’t thinking much about the complications of her citations, but I, for one, am wondering where she found her Tardis.