'I'm feeling witchy.' - Tim
Friday, 8:20 p.m.
My current shift started about an hour ago, and I'm already worried about my staying power. I didn't get as much sleep today as I'd have liked, thanks to a group of visiting high school science teachers who are here for a weekend astronomy conference. It's a pretty awesome program, bringing teachers from all over Australia, and predominantly from rural areas, to Parkes to learn exciting stuff to add to their curricula, and I have no gripe with that. The problem is that they're teachers, which automatically means that you can't tell them anything (I say that as the daughter of a teacher, the niece of two teachers, the friend of many teachers, and a teacher myself), and they're science teachers who are here with other science teachers to worship at the altar of geekery, so the level of social skills is maybe not so high overall. And they reckon they're pretty special being here, which doesn't help. So when they're told by a mere staff member that the door to the women's quarters needs to stay shut because there's an observer sleeping all day (an observer who, unluckily, has the room closest to that door and therefore the common spaces where everyone congregates loudly), they don't give a damn, because a staff member is not someone they're interested in listening to - she doesn't even have a badge, for crying out loud! And thus if it's easier for them to keep propping the door open, well by god, they're going to do it. So poor Jenny kept shutting the door all day long, trying to keep things quiet for me, but the teachers were convinced they knew better, and kept re-propping it.
The teachers did not know better.
At any rate, I woke up pretty much just as the weekly barbecue was starting, which was good in a way, as I'd wanted to have dinner with a few of the staff I liked who only work weekdays - I leave on Sunday, so this would be my last chance to see them. Unfortunately, I got bumped from my seat at dinner (my mug of tea was in that spot for a reason, genius), and ended up at a table full of... visiting teachers! I sat very still and ate my food quietly and made my escape as soon as I could, but it wasn't nearly soon enough. I was near tears at this point, from the tiredness and the jangled body clock, and it didn't help that I had just learned from one of the staff that, due to a problem with some filter somewhere, all of the observations Tim and I had done for the first 36 hours were junk.
Tim, poor bugger, had had his own run-in with the teachers earlier in the day, while he was trying to sort out the problem that had effed up all the observations. The teachers came into the Control Room en masse and made such a ruckus that he had to shush them because he couldn't hear the guy he was working with, who was sitting only a foot away from him. And if that wasn't bad enough, 10 minutes later he had to do it again. All I could think of was my Dad, who would have turned around with That Look and snapped, 'You are GUESTS here, darlings. Behave yourselves.' Bad enough from kids, but these were grown men and women, and there is no excuse.
I realise I might sound harsh, but it's all a good example of how extreme circumstances can bring out the worst in people. It's tight quarters here, and the staff are overworked and often underslept, and, well, let's just say that I've met a couple of folks who I'm guessing would have been in specialised/selective schools throughout their formative years and are the best argument for public schooling I've ever seen. Parents, please: expose your children to normal humans. Your babies may be gifted and talented in all sorts of ways, but proper socialisation only comes from participating in society. Your kids need to learn to play well with others. I've seen what happens if you don't allow that to happen, and NO ONE THINKS IT'S CUTE.
[/ rant]
Anyway. As I said, I'm a bit worn tonight. My eyes are a bit blurry and scorched-feeling, and the fluoro lights and the computer screens aren't helping. I mean, I'm fine, and despite all my bitching I'm still thrilled to bits to be here, so all of this is just trivial and by-the-way. It's just... at some point you start expecting adults to behave like adults, you know? If you're visiting a place, you treat it with respect. If you're in someone's workspace, you do your best not to get in the way. You treat everyone with courtesy until/unless they give you a reason not to. You do not ever, EVER assume that you are special, because you are not. In fact, the more special the experience feels to you, the less special you are likely to be to the experience, if you follow me: it is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for me to be here, and I am fortunate enough to be one of the handful of people in the world who will ever have the opportunity to do what I'm doing. But I am well aware that The Dish and its staff do not need me (and they certainly don't need a bunch of high school teachers from Far West Woop Woop). I need them, and it therefore behooves me to make it as easy as possible for them to give me what I need.
Naturally, Tim worked all this out a long time ago: if you're nice to the people who Get Stuff Done, your stuff is much more likely to get done. And I think most people know this on some level, but they fall down by failing to realise that the people who Get Stuff Done are rarely the people with the fancy titles. Those people are often of great help, of course, but when it comes down to the daily nitty-gritty, they aren't the ones who will feed you or house you or make sure your paperwork gets to the right people on time. If you work in an office, get to know the admin staff. If you spend your time living at telescopes, get to know the support staff. These are the people who make the place run; they know the ins and outs and arounds; and they always have the best gossip.
But enough of this. There's more than enough wondrousness around me here to distract me from my bitching. The sky... wow. It's huge. It seems to stretch forever, even in daylight; at night it defies description.
And it's dark. The darkness here is much darker than the darkness I'm used to. I'd forgotten what real darkness actually looks like, and here? It is absolute. And because we're coming up to winter, it's pitch by 6:00 p.m. and stays that way for more than 12 hours. I keep forgetting how dark it is and stepping outside without a torch, only to take two steps and have no idea where the hell I am.
The flip side of this is that the sunshine seems really white, really clear. Maybe I'm used to the haze of the city and the ocean, but the light here is messing with me. The strength of it - not the heat, but the light - plays with my brain in some way that makes me feel like it's much later in the day than it is. Couple that with the dark dark darkness that kicks in so early and I'm misestimating the time by two or three hours all day and night.
And there are animals! Kangaroos galore, of course, because it's kind of a safe haven for them, but also rabbits and all kinds of beautiful birds. There are galahs, which I love beyond all reason, and a couple of different kinds of parakeet in garishly bright colours, and then tonight, on the drive up to the telescope from the quarters, we passed an owl sitting like lawn statuary on the side of the road. It was the first time I've ever seen an owl in the wild, and it was profoundly disturbing because even as we drove by I could feel it judging me. Owls, man. They're intimidating.
The kangaroos are my favourite, though. I know around here they're more like pests than anything, but they're so...I don't know, different. They've got these really sweet, goofy faces, like rabbits, stuck on these massive bodies that move in exactly the wrong way. They hop. That is not right.
The narrow road between the telescope and the quarters is densely lined with trees on both sides, which separate the road from the big paddocks where the kangaroos hang out. On our first day here, as Tim and I walked up the road to the telescope, the 'roos had taken up positions amongst the trees all the way up, and it was hard not to feel like we were on parade. This is the closest that Tim has yet been to any kangaroos, and he was equally impressed and spooked by the stern way they watched every step we took. This was surpassed, though, when a mob went hopping across the road all around us. Because the paddocks are fenced, most of them chose to follow the same path across, where there were open gates in the fences on both sides, but what made it quite funny for the human observers was that the path they followed was the old train tracks, and they went across in tight single file, right on each others' tails, so it looked for all the world like a bunch of kangaroos playing train. Awesomer.
