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A nice woman from Amtrak called me this afternoon. I cheerfully said "Oh, good, I was wondering where my tickets were."
Where my tickets were was waiting for Amtrak to get around to telling me that, for a trip to Canada, they needed to have my date of birth and citizenship on record. (If I'd booked by phone, they'd have asked at the time, but they hadn't added it to the Web ticket sales at the time I ordered.) Okay, I can answer that. But it gets better. What she asked me was date of birth and country of residency. So I told her those, then she told me I'd have the tickets in a couple of days (fine, I don't leave for a fortnight) and we talked a little about why they were doing it this way. It's for Customs, and they want citizenship info, to save time or something. I pointed out that in my case they're the same, but that wasn't what she'd asked me. She was dismayed at her error, and thanked me for pointing it out--it might cause problems if someone, honestly, told the person on the phone that they live in the US, then got to the border and presented a Canadian or New Zealand passport to a border guard who had paperwork listing them as a US citizen.
Fact-checking conversations. What will I think of next?
What I need to think of next is where to find out more/enough on Neolithic civilizations in China, and which of my sources on the Minoans, if any, are trustworthy. Actually, I'm making reasonable progress on this, I think--it just feels a little too much like writing a paper for a course I've skipped a month of lectures in. I wonder if the cheerful Bronze Age Greek bureaucrats made this sort of mistake, or if they didn't care about those questions, as long as they knew how much wheat you'd grown and the names of all your cattle. (I remember, for no good reason, that a Minoan Greek farmer had a bull called "Blackie"--this was tossed off as an example of the thoroughness of Minoan records by one of my professors, which means no later than 1985. I have never had any use for this fact. Nobody has had any use for it in 3000 years. But this is how my mind works--and, I guess, how at least one other person's mind works, because someone plucked it out of the documents and passed it along.) And what did happen to the Mycenaeans? (Nobody knows--there are speculations, but nobody knows. Like the classical Maya, they just fade out of history, their cities abandoned.)
Where my tickets were was waiting for Amtrak to get around to telling me that, for a trip to Canada, they needed to have my date of birth and citizenship on record. (If I'd booked by phone, they'd have asked at the time, but they hadn't added it to the Web ticket sales at the time I ordered.) Okay, I can answer that. But it gets better. What she asked me was date of birth and country of residency. So I told her those, then she told me I'd have the tickets in a couple of days (fine, I don't leave for a fortnight) and we talked a little about why they were doing it this way. It's for Customs, and they want citizenship info, to save time or something. I pointed out that in my case they're the same, but that wasn't what she'd asked me. She was dismayed at her error, and thanked me for pointing it out--it might cause problems if someone, honestly, told the person on the phone that they live in the US, then got to the border and presented a Canadian or New Zealand passport to a border guard who had paperwork listing them as a US citizen.
Fact-checking conversations. What will I think of next?
What I need to think of next is where to find out more/enough on Neolithic civilizations in China, and which of my sources on the Minoans, if any, are trustworthy. Actually, I'm making reasonable progress on this, I think--it just feels a little too much like writing a paper for a course I've skipped a month of lectures in. I wonder if the cheerful Bronze Age Greek bureaucrats made this sort of mistake, or if they didn't care about those questions, as long as they knew how much wheat you'd grown and the names of all your cattle. (I remember, for no good reason, that a Minoan Greek farmer had a bull called "Blackie"--this was tossed off as an example of the thoroughness of Minoan records by one of my professors, which means no later than 1985. I have never had any use for this fact. Nobody has had any use for it in 3000 years. But this is how my mind works--and, I guess, how at least one other person's mind works, because someone plucked it out of the documents and passed it along.) And what did happen to the Mycenaeans? (Nobody knows--there are speculations, but nobody knows. Like the classical Maya, they just fade out of history, their cities abandoned.)
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From:
no subject
From:
no subject
When I first read this, I was reminded of what I was sure was a recurring theme in science fiction. And now I can't remember where I've encountered it. Here's all I can remember.
and now this is going to bother me.
From:
no subject
Redbird,
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I'll take any good security anecdotes you find.
B
From:
Oh, definetely!
Your project looks really interesting. Do you do the Ancient World for a living?
--A
From:
Re: Oh, definetely!
I'm co-writing an "SAT II" World History review book. I got this job because the resume I sent out for something completely unrelated (math editing work) had "versatile writer and editor" in the summary line, and mentioned at the bottom that my degree is in history.
From:
Chinese History
From:
no subject