The Most Fun I've Had In School All Year...

The top two fears people have are death and public speaking, and not in that order.

I've known what it's like to be shot at, and recently, so I figure giving my hour long public speech today should be a cake-walk. It is. I kicked some Basic Excel Class hinder.

Touching on the Merge And Center button, I said "I like to use this to create headings, column descriptions, that sort of thing. It takes many cells and combines them into one. Kind of like communism, only useful, and, you know, not evil."

Got a laugh out of the class, even the teacher.

The next presenter, a friend of mine, gets up to do his speech. He starts off by saying he resents my anti-Communist statement. In fact he is one, and it's working well in China.

Vincent's response:"Maybe. But they had to whack twenty million people to get there. That doesn't scream progress benchmark to me."

So. His presentation is on harrassment. Trots out the usual statistics, the vast majority of cases go unrecorded, 15,000 cases go before the court every year (and climbing), harrassment rates are climbing, 1 in 3 people will be harrassed, harrassment can be just about anything, etc and so forth.

Vincent is scribbling notes furiously. At a pause, I raise my hand. He calls on me.

"So, if harrassment can be any action that offends people, and the vast majority of cases go unrecorded, how do we know that said harrassment is taking place, could it non-existant, or could it be people making it up?"

He says that yes, that's a possibility.

"Also, harrassment convictions are what matter. If fifteen thousand cases go before the courts every year, increasing, and the number that get tossed out increase right along with them, that isn't exactly a rising tide of a problem."

"My site was kind of...biased..."

I don't remember exactly what I said next, but it was something similar to: "So what your basically telling me is that harrassment is sort of like divorce court. You can make crap up without consequences, and the guy always gets screwed?"

I'm one of those few individuals who is blessed enough to love my work.