I got home from work on Tuesday, still thinking about all the crap I'd had to deal with at work. I had the responsibility for the royalties stuff basically foisted on me when the previous person decided to go back to school full-time, and I don't really know what I'm doing most of the time, so when problems crop up (as they have been doing frequently the last few weeks), I don't really know how to fix them, but I have to try anyway--possibly screwing things up even more in the process.
Anyway, I got home, and needed to unwind. So I checked my e-mail and went upstairs to read. I was almost finished with Temeraire, and I wanted to be able to start a new book Wednesday morning. I finished the book around 9:15. I looked at the clock, and something struck me as odd.
Then I remembered--it was Tuesday! I should have been in class an hour and a half before that! And to top it off, we had a quiz on Tuesday. The teacher usually lets us out early (class is supposed to end at 10:20) if he's finished with the lecture and whatever else needs to get done, so I wasn't sure I would be able to get to class before everybody left, even though I'm only a ten-minute drive away.
Panicking, I sent an e-mail to the teacher, explaining my absent-mindedness (I hadn't even realized it was Tuesday, much less time to go to class), and practically begging to be allowed to make up the quiz. I'm hoping I get a reply before class tonight though, because I'm not sure he won't be going over the quiz tonight. If he does, I'll just have to take the zero. I can't remember how many points each quiz is out of the 1,000 for the semester, but I hope it's not a letter-grade's worth if I'm not allowed to make it up. I've also set my phone to alert me when it's time to leave for school on Tuesdays and Thursdays now.
This whole situation irks me, because I'm usually so good with getting to class on time (in fact, I'm usually early, so that I can sit in the hallway to read for a while).
I started a new book yesterday called The Briar King by Greg Keyes. It's one of two books by him given to me by one of my visiting teachers (Temeraire was also a gift from her). So far, it's very intriguing, and also somewhat confusing. At first, I had trouble figuring out what the heck was going on (for longer than usual), but now that I'm almost halfway through it's easier to follow.
It's interesting though--the maps included look like the northeast quadrant of the United States, from the bottom tip of Virginia, up to the tip of Lake Michigan or so, but with a lot of distortion, and only water south of Virginia. I keep having to look at the maps again as I read, so that I know what places they're talking about. The names of people and places are kind of weird too.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
The Absent-Minded Astronomy Student
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What kind of royalty stuff are they asking you to deal with? *What sort of rights does Publish America buy?*
ReplyDeleteI was put in the position of the actual royalties calculation process. It involves this extremely convoluted Microsoft Access database.
ReplyDeleteThat's rather odd. I mean, shouldn't royalties basically amount to "this quarter we sold X of your books and you get Y per book sold so X times Y = the amount of your royalty check*?
ReplyDeleteYes, that's exactly what it is, but we have to do that for every single book in print (or taken out of print in the last six months) in our database.
ReplyDeleteWe have over 20,000 books in print (or recently cancelled), hence the database, which does all the calculations for us, as long as the queries and things get run in the correct order (and the database was created correctly).
Since I know almost nothing about visual basic or SQL, and I'm an extreme beginner at MSAccess, most times, I just follow the directions left by the guy who created the database, and hope it works correctly. If it doesn't work correctly, the company has hired a database consultant, who I ask to fix it.