How on earth did this happen?

I turned in what is/was to be my second dissertation — because as Weber pointed out, becoming an established member of the intellectual aristocracy requires the publication of not one book but two — only to find that I had mis-specified an equation.  And so my boss/advisor, wiser in these ways than I, asked me to revisit the numbers.

He was, of course, right.

This required that I learn a new statistical technique, in a programming language with which I am at best only hesitatingly fluent, and in regards to which I could receive absolutely no help from either my current or my former colleagues.

Dude, I called a woman whose paycheck comes alternately from the US Goverment and the Emir of Qatar, and I still had to figure this sh*t out basically on my own.

So, the end result?  I taught myself how to do what is definitely one of the more conceptually obtuse statistical techniques, using a programming language not precisely designed for said technique.   Because arbeiten fur den Mann does not guarantee that you will be provided with the best tools for the job.

All so that I could say, without absolute confidence, something that we already knew: namely that the outcome of a test is as much a product of who does the grading as it is a product of who is being graded, and that the grade depends almost not at all upon the circumstances under which the test is administered.

Or, in simpler language: you take a test, and sometimes the prof is an mean motherf*cker, and sometimes you’re just not up to it.  But either way it doesn’t really matter whether you take the exam in the classroom, in the hallway, in the Commons, or under the watchful eye of the principal. 

With absolute statistical precision, down to the 4th significant digit, I can say these things.

I do not understand — no, really, I don’t — how I became this person. 

Let me tell you a story.  My senior year of college, I took a statistics course.  From the worst professor ever to grace the cool sandstone cloisters of my alma mater, a man so astonishingly poor in his teaching skill that I was moved to write a letter of complaint to the ombudsman.

For which I received a pro-forma letter telling me to suck up my grade and stop complaining.

For the record, I got an A-.  I was most certainly not complaining about the grade.

No.  I was complaining about the unremitting hostility this professor had inculcated in me for a subject, the practice of which now ironically pays for my bread and butter.

I was so bilious after my final exam for that course that I took my calculator out into the Quad and smashed it.  With a ball-peen hammer which I had secreted into my backpack especially for such purpose.

I have rarely tasted such delicious joy as the day on which I sat smashing that calculator, over and over like some demented child in a D.H. Lawrence short story.

This joy, needless to say, turned to dust and ashes in my mouth when I showed up for graduate school and enrolled in yet another statistics course.  Thankfully that course was not taught by a complete jackass.  Thought it was taught in a room with a high-pitched whine from the AV that required the application of two tylenol, a 20-ouncer of diet coke, and a large chocolate-chip cookie to silence.

Someday, somehow, I will learn to appreciate this lesson.  But not today, nohow.  I can still too easily taste the sour joy that comes with watching silicone solar cells shatter against sandstone bricks on a hot June day.