Our cat received a letter from the vet reminding him that in his aged decrepitude, he should see the vet twice a year instead of once. It pointed out that seeing the vet once a year is comparable to seeing the doctor once every 7 years for his owners.
Colliculus read the letter to me and asked, "Isn't that kind of like throwing good money after bad?"
I told him he should write "Good money after bad!" on the letter and mail it back to the vet.
The reason I have more time to do things like read the cat's mail is that I finally finished my marketing program. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to have my Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays back. Night school totally sucks. I don't know how Tim has managed to work on his MBA for all these years without showing any noticeable signs of strain. It was a good program, though, and I used up the money I got for doing AmeriCorps.
I hope I don't make my academic friends paranoid when I say that in class, I reverted to my teenage self and found myself studying the instructors. These are just regular professionals like myself, so it's not really fair, but when you stare at someone for 2 1/2 hours twice a week it becomes like a TV relationship; you know so much more about them than they know about you.
The last instructor I had, in Direct Marketing, was so nice - total "Dad" manner - but so passive-aggressive. Whenever anyone talked during the lecture or didn't settle down after the break you could tell he was about to lose it. He never did, but the tension bothered me enough that I'd choose my seat to avoid sitting next to any of the habitual offenders.
The guy before that was bald and named Dome. He taught integrated marketing communications. His co-instructor was a woman younger than me who used to work with him but had moved on to another agency for reasons she never said. We later caught a glimpse of them together in a picture with his kids.
The class before that, which was internet marketing, I don't have anything remarkable to say about the instructor. He was nice, about our age, and lived down the street from me in Wrigleyville. That was the class where I made a spectacle of myself by carrying the enormous umbrella all the time.
The class before that, branding, was taught by two guys named Alan and Ilan. Alan was client-side, B2B, and from the Midwest. Picture John Cusack with a Powerpoint deck. Ilan had worked for a number of agencies all over the world. His accent was impossible to identify. He wore jeans and taught through videos and stories of past ad campaigns in Africa and Europe. Picture one of those old foreign guys who seduces art school girls.
The class before that convinced me never to go into market research. Our instructor had to miss two meetings to fly to Atlanta to run focus groups in which participants had to sort a giant pile of similar sponges and discuss their feelings about the different kinds.
There was one before that, Principles of Marketing, which involved ancient case studies of products such as a new kind of pile driver and an industrial adhesive that never made it to market. Nobody wanted to get this instructor because he was such a complete, dyed-in-the-wool fuddy-dud who said things like, "If you do that, you'll be on your way to Joliet!" [pause for effect].
Next weekend we're going to NC to visit my grandparents so I have to take some pictures of the house, which I will post. Also going to see TLC and
CryingBabyJebus, happiness!
