Pet Peeve: You're about to walk up a narrow stairway (wide enough for two people), but lo and behold, two people are walking down, talking together, side by side. They see you, you see them. Does one move to the same side as the other at any point? NO! You have to stand at the bottom, waiting for them to walk alllll the way down the stairs, very slowly (and these aren't old people, here), to give you a chance to walk up. ARAAAARGH! Very similar pet peeve is when this same thing happens on the sidewalk. I don't care who I'm walking next to; when I see another person coming, I'll fall back to give walking room on the sidewalk to the person approaching me. Why do SO many other people not do this? I get pushed off into the mud because of this more times than I care to count. (As in, end up walking in the mud, not falling on my butt in the mud. That would get me a lot more than just peeved.)
Pet Peeve: There are two rolls of toilet paper, one smaller than the other. Why do people use the larger one? It's twenty times more efficient for both the janitor and you if you only use teh smaller one until it's gone. Otherwise, you're at this weird halfway point with both rolls, and they don't get replaced until they're both entirely gone, or they replace them a little early, and you have those small, almost finished ones sitting around, but no one uses them, they just use the new big ones, and the little ones multiply. This is a very small pet peeve of mine.
Whew, that was enough venting.
Now, I get to talk about data collecting today! Haha, it was the most horrible mess of a thing. First off, my group had to print all of our questionnaires (14 pg. ea), invitations to participate, consent forms, and debriefing letters ourselves, at about 9 cents a double-sided page. The school apparently doesn't provide for this sort of thing... Anyways! There were about sixty people in the class we were going to give our questionnaire, so we printed a little over sixty copies of everything, just in case. It was supposed to be our turn to collect data in this class at 9:40, but we all decided to arrive at 9:30, just in case. Even more just in case, I arrived at 9:15, to find that the floor was already ours. Each member had versions of the questionnaires, and the invitations to participate. We're supposed to pass out the invitation to participate, then the consent form, then the questionnaire, then the debriefing letter, and keep it all very scripted. Gregg and I, the only people there yet, only had the consent form and one version of the questionnaire. So we were totally unscripted (oh no, ethics!! :-P), passed out the consent form and thenthe invitation to participate after our other group members arrived (oh no, ETHICS!!!! :-P) and then the questionnaire. Some people slipped out without debriefing letters, so they'll never really know what the study was about, oh well. OH, the real kicker here is that, of course, there were only 38 people in class. So we all wasted soooo much money printing everything off, augh.
The point of all of this is that in my little undergraduate psychology student's life, today was very important for me. Under ethical clearance (whoops) I conducted a study and collected data for the first time. Yay!!! I need a bottle of champagne to open or something, but instead I'll go grab a coffee
