Earlier today, I had a guest lecture for my legal studies field work course that is highest on the scale of “could have gone disastrous.”

Our guest lecturer works closely with matters regarding the death penalty. The topic itself is great – there have been so much research done on the death penalty, there are so many opinions that exist about the death penalty, and there are so many personal stories one could have regarding working with people on death row, that the lecture can’t go wrong just from the topic itself.

Where it does go wrong, however, is the length of the presentation.

My lecture period is 75 minutes long. Today, we started about five minutes late due to random prep­a­ra­tion issues and technical difficulties, and spent about ten minutes going over some announce­ments, other class materials, and introducing the guest speaker.

It was finally time for the guest lecturer to begin her presentation.

Ten minutes later it was over. She asked if we had any questions.

Yes, she left 50 minutes at the end to answer our questions.

Now, it’s great that she cares so much about our input that she leaves five times as much time for questions than her presentation. But if she was faced with a silent class (which, fortunately for her, she wasn’t), that would’ve been pretty disastrous.

Voicemail is a pretty nice invention. It lets people deliver vocal messages to you without you having to be there.

The keyword with voicemail, however, is “message.” The point is that you leave your message so you can establish successful and as-complete-as-possible communication with the other person as soon as they listen to the voicemail.

A few days ago, someone I know (who will remain unnamed) left me a voicemail that was such a failure that I had to write about it.

The intent of this person was to remind me to do something (which I had already done). Instead of leaving a message along the lines of “don’t forget to do this,” they instead left the message, “call me back.”

Now, unfortunately for me, this person is important enough that it is in my best interest to call them back as soon as possible. The problem was that I did not have my phone with me. The only reason I was able to listen to the voicemail was because I get my voicemails sent to my email inbox, and I can listen to them anywhere I am.

So, the easy solution is that I just go get my phone and call them back, right?

Not quite that easy.

I happened to be almost a mile away from my apartment where my phone was, and it was raining out­side. So in order to call this person back, I had to walk almost a mile in the rain back to my room to get my phone.

Which I did.

I’m sure you can imagine how annoyed I was when I found out what their message was.

The worst part was that I had to proceed to return to my previous location by retracing my near-mile-long trail of steps back through the rain.

So here is a public service announcement. If you need to deliver a message to someone, SAY YOUR MESSAGE IN THE VOICEMAIL, INSTEAD OF JUST ASKING TO CALL YOU BACK.

Have a nice day

While walking between buildings today on my university campus, I came across this strange icicle.

It was literally growing out of a pole, and from various angles, looked somewhat like a rib cage. The pole itself was also entirely covered in ice.

I got an interesting surprise yesterday – a staff member at my apartment building came to my door and hand-delivered this gourmet cupcake and a $10 gift card to Jimmy John’s (which happens to be my favorite sandwich shop).

How do I know that it was a gourmet cupcake and not a regular cupcake? Because it came in a box that looks more expensive than the cupcake itself.

That picture doesn’t serve that gourmet cupcake justice – the cupcake itself was larger than the size of my fist.

My apartment staff has a history of giving random gifts to their residents, like chocolates during the holiday season and random free food at the front desk, but I thought it was just funny that they gave out gourmet cupcakes this time.

I received a notice on Tuesday that there would be some construction going on in my psychology re­search lab office yesterday. So, I didn’t go to my office yesterday just in case they were still doing construction at the time I normally go in.

When I arrived at my office today, I encountered a nice little not-so-nice surprise.

They finished all the construction, but it seems like they thought it would be acceptable to leave massive brown streaks of who knows what on the wall and on the floor.

The worst part is that I use the office at the far end of this hallway as well, so I’ll be repeatedly walking through this gritty splatter of strange substance while I’m here…