My Rant on Playing Dumb

On Sunday I had an argument with my girlfriend on the way to an Oscar party.

At stake was the Toronto Escalator Rules, which I shall repost now for everyone's benefit so you don't have to click and visit the other page.

What happened was a crowd of us was going down the stairs, my girlfriend walking beside me and we were holding hands. On the left was an escalator going up, which means people at the bottom of the stairs who wanted to go up had two choices:

#1. Take the escalator up, and not block anyone coming down the stairs.

#2. Make the illogical choice of coming up the stairs and blocking the crowd of people coming down.

And lo and behold two morons with their baseball caps turned backwards decided to be jerks and go up the stairs, blocking people on the way and slowing everyone down - meanwhile there was a perfectly EMPTY escalator going in the direction they wanted to go.

They could have - very easily - got on the empty escalator, gone up it at whatever speed they felt like going, and got to the top very quickly and easily.

But no, they decided to block the people coming down.

So I decided to complain very loudly about it.

"Wow, some people are just too stupid to know when to use the escalator."

And then when I got to the bottom of the stairs my girlfriend decided to play dumb and pretended not to know what I was talking about. She even tried to claim that it was not a crowd of people going down the stairs. (There was a pack of 15 people at least on the stairs when I said it.)

And then we got into an argument about what constitutes a crowd.

And she tried to claim that there was only 1 person ahead of us on the stairs when there was at least 6 people ahead of us, not counting the two jerks blocking the stairs.

When I realized she was doing this all deliberately, playing dumb and making me very frustrated I told her off for doing that to me. It was really frustrating. There was no reason for her to be arguing with me and she was trying to make me feel stupid by pretending to be stupid herself.

ARG!!!!!

I get frustrated and angry just thinking about the incident.

Basically my end point here is DO NOT PRETEND TO BE DUMB. You are only annoying people unnecessarily.

It is one thing if your name is Rob Ford and you are just naturally stupid (and annoy people with your sheer dumbness), but it is another thing entirely when you pretend to be stupid as a gag just so you can frustrate your fellow human beings by pretending you don't know what they are talking about.

I swear if she ever does that again I am going to switch the sugar with the salt so she ends up with a spoonful of salt in her coffee. Then we shall see who has the last laugh.

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And then of course there are people who are just plain dumb. I blame our education system that places too much emphasis on looks (drama class, seriously?) and not enough emphasis on simple things like English writing, math, geography...

Plagiarism in Essay Writing

Years ago when I was working on my Doctorate of Musical Arts at U of T when I was accused of plagiarism in some older essay work I had done.

Basically what it was I had written an essay years earlier, before studying my doctorate, and one of my professors thought it looked fishy when another copy of the same essay showed up and tried to prove it was plagiarized.

Fortunately I cleared my name by promptly showing all professors and university staff involved my rough drafts for the essay (I had gone through 4 rough drafts) which had been saved years ago and I had just never deleted anything from that part of my life.

Basically the fact that I am a pack rat saved my bacon. I don't throw things out, especially electronic documents.

So word to the wise people, save your drafts and keep them for posterity's sake. You will not regret it.

What had happened however is that I had posted my finished essay (the one I was accused of plagiarizing) online and I had posted it without using my name - in other words, I had posted it anonymously.

Someone else (I don't know who) then copy pasted my essay off of the website and then submitted my essay as their own professor.

What the student didn't know was that they were handing in the same essay to the same professor (for the same class no less) as I had years earlier.

The professor reading my old essay felt it looked familiar, as if they had read it before. So they checked their records / refreshed their memory and remembered me.

Yada yada yada, the next thing I know they are accusing me of plagiarism, of selling my old essay for profit and were threatening to take my degree away from me. (Which they can legally do if they can prove plagiarism.)

Fortunately I did prove that the essay was mine by showing them my old rough drafts.

And I was able to show them the old forum website which I had posted the essay on. Still there, complete with the date it was originally posted. (And I could prove it was me who posted it because I still had the login and password to access the forum.)

My name was cleared, but having such a bureaucratic spotlight thrust upon me (especially when I had done nothing wrong) had made me not very comfortable about the whole plagiarism topic.

It took me years before I finally decided to write this post and talk openly about the incident. Now that I have my Doctorate I feel much firmer and safer about talking about the incident.

Universities have become increasingly aware that there is a lot academic dishonesty going on - especially amongst women, who make up 80% of customers for essay writing companies in Toronto, Hamilton and Kitchener/Waterloo. It is such a problem amongst female students that it has raised the grade point average of all the women in universities that have essay writing companies near the university campuses.

I think the issue for men is that men are too lazy and too cheap to hire someone else to write an essay for them, they would rather just write a poorly written essay, hand it in and get a lower mark rather than hire someone to write the essay for them.

The companies themselves have also legitimized themselves by also offering resume writing, CV and cover letter writing services. And even online classes on how to write assignments for classes.

Once they have a student hooked on their services it is really just a matter of time before students start paying for essays using their credit card.

The problem is even more prevalent at big universities that have a lot of prestige. The more important the school is the more competition there is from such companies that are offering essay and assignment writing services.

But I do have an important question.

What happens when these people get out into the real world and need to write reports for the company they work for? Are they going to hire someone else to write the report for them?

I have even heard tales of people hiring other people to write / create presentations for PowerPoint.

Back when I was in university we were still using overhead projectors and slideshows during presentations, but now with PowerPoint the information for the presentation can be written down and designed electronically, saved as PowerPoint document (PPT), sent to the person who purchased it... and then that person presents the finished product and utilizes their acting skills at lying.

How is an university professor going to accuse them of plagiarism when they are presenting it in person as a PowerPoint presentation.

I wish they would bring back overhead projectors and slideshows. Just my 2 cents.

Bored today

I know I should be doing work today...

But it is a Friday and rainy... And I want to goof off instead. Ah why do I have to work in an office?

Why can't playing the piano pay more... :(

Silly cat, laps are comfy

I took this photo with my phone because the cat wouldn't get up. Ever tried to move a cat that doesn't want to go? They just dig their claws in - in to your leg!