As for the latter few parts of your week, I can say that I've also been 'drafted' for such projects. Just as an example, the school's drama teacher just decided to pull me out of everything two days before their performance, leaving me with two days to learn the ins-and-outs of how I'm supposed to work the sound/lights/spotlight into the show. And, after this entire thing of staying five hours late on my Friday night to help them, you'd expect them to give credit where credit is due, at least to the audience, right? WRONG, they decide to give all the credit to somebody else and phrase it as "Don worked the spotlights" instead of "Don set up our sound system, stage lights, house lights, spotlights, and helped sell tickets"...
I know that 'Napoleon Dynamite' movie is quite popular. Then again, I never get a chance to watch many movies or TV -- the last TV I got a chance to watch was a few weeks ago, and the last movie I saw was in late 2003. I even remember, back when I was in eighth grade, that towards the end of the year (since there wasn't as much work to do), we'd get free periods in which the class may get to watch a small bit of some movie. Well, I was expected to set up the movie on the VCR, and then report to the principal to fix their computers. Of course, I needed to know the exact run time of the video so I could get back down and shut the thing off, and if necessary, get back to what I was doing. So, I had to set it up and all, but never really got a chance to watch it.
As for database entry -- in my eighth grade year, my school re-did their entire library. So, lots of books had to be checked out of their database, since they were outdated (and I mean outdated, unless you consider 1960s-era reference to be new). That means I had to give up my break, lunch, and a few hours after school every day to go check books out of an awful database management system called Librarian's Edge. Of course, for some reason they decided to keep two copies of the database -- one on the machine, and one on paper, so I had to take the entries off the computer and off the paper list for each book. I told them it would be easier to re-print the contents of the database when I finished, but no, I needed to continuously do both. Better yet, they had some other guy remove the last ten books from the system, so HE got all the credit for removing ten books (and they made it look like he did the entire thing), while I removed some 3,000 and got absolutely nothing for it -- not even a nice engraving of my name on the plaque they got for the volunteers.
Case-in-point for the above three rants: everybody knows that they can easily take advantage of me, without needing anything back.
As for the latter few parts of your week, I can say that I've also been 'drafted' for such projects. Just as an example, the school's drama teacher just decided to pull me out of everything two days before their performance, leaving me with two days to learn the ins-and-outs of how I'm supposed to work the sound/lights/spotlight into the show. And, after this entire thing of staying five hours late on my Friday night to help them, you'd expect them to give credit where credit is due, at least to the audience, right? WRONG, they decide to give all the credit to somebody else and phrase it as "Don worked the spotlights" instead of "Don set up our sound system, stage lights, house lights, spotlights, and helped sell tickets"...
I know that 'Napoleon Dynamite' movie is quite popular. Then again, I never get a chance to watch many movies or TV -- the last TV I got a chance to watch was a few weeks ago, and the last movie I saw was in late 2003. I even remember, back when I was in eighth grade, that towards the end of the year (since there wasn't as much work to do), we'd get free periods in which the class may get to watch a small bit of some movie. Well, I was expected to set up the movie on the VCR, and then report to the principal to fix their computers. Of course, I needed to know the exact run time of the video so I could get back down and shut the thing off, and if necessary, get back to what I was doing. So, I had to set it up and all, but never really got a chance to watch it.
As for database entry -- in my eighth grade year, my school re-did their entire library. So, lots of books had to be checked out of their database, since they were outdated (and I mean outdated, unless you consider 1960s-era reference to be new). That means I had to give up my break, lunch, and a few hours after school every day to go check books out of an awful database management system called Librarian's Edge. Of course, for some reason they decided to keep two copies of the database -- one on the machine, and one on paper, so I had to take the entries off the computer and off the paper list for each book. I told them it would be easier to re-print the contents of the database when I finished, but no, I needed to continuously do both. Better yet, they had some other guy remove the last ten books from the system, so HE got all the credit for removing ten books (and they made it look like he did the entire thing), while I removed some 3,000 and got absolutely nothing for it -- not even a nice engraving of my name on the plaque they got for the volunteers.
Case-in-point for the above three rants: everybody knows that they can easily take advantage of me, without needing anything back.