Saturday, April 10, 2021

What is the opposite of useful?

 A couple of careers ago I was a school administrator. I handled most issues regarding the students at a job training school. It was one of these After-High-School-Learn-A-Skill-Get-A-Job places. Our students were mostly kind of adults.  One of the less interesting things I had to do was to get students there mail.Often, the grades and bills we would mail to them would get returned to us. Usually I would just find the student and hand them their mail and that would be the end of it. Sometimes they would tell me the address is incorrect and I would fix it in our system. But usually it was a one-off problem because the post office was the post office.  If I remembered that  I was doing this repeatedly for the same student I would actually ask them to look at the envelope and tell me if the address was correct.


There was one kid who insisted his address was correct after his mail kept getting returned to us. It was a long time ago but I remember it said XXXX  90th Street in Brooklyn. After the third  time his mail was returned to us I asked him what neighborhood he lived in.  He told me he lived in Canarsie. Canarsie would be East 90th Street. 90th Street is in Bay Ridge.  I told him if he lives in Canarsie there should be an East in front of the name of his Street..  He asked me what the difference was between East 90th and 90th. I told him it's the difference between where he lives and where he doesn't live. He told me no, I'm in the 90th Street gang. I smiled and told him his gang was a bunch of Lost Boys And corrected his records in the computer. When you get information that's incorrect when you think it should be correct it is a waste of your time

This is a picture of a photograph hanging
in the men's room at the tennis center.
It shows the cherry trees,
the reservoir and the buildings on the westside of
Central Park including the San Remo
which was destroyed during the filming of Ghostbusters

This is a picture I took myself
while running. It shows a little bit of the cherry
ree the reservoir and the San Remo


I bring this up because I recently joined Strava. It's an app that tracks how far I run and where I run. As I run it tells me how fast each mile is and it keeps track of my personal records. I'm planning a marathon in 2 months so I'm bumping up my mileage. My plan today was to run 10 times around the reservoir in Central Park. It's marked as 1.58 miles. That's where I plan to do the marathon. I made the 10 laps of the reservoir and I actually made four trips to the bathroom at the tennis center. It's a tenth of a mile each way to the bathroom. That 16.6 miles. Strava put me at 17.44 miles. That's kind of a significant difference.
 

And it looks like all that extra mileage was on my miles 7 and 8. You can see them being 4 minutes per mile faster then most of the rest of my miles and if you look at the map it looks like I was leaving the reservoir Loop multiple times on the east side of The Reservoir. This makes all the information I got useless. I did not run 2 speedy miles and I did not run on and off of the reservoir track. What good is this. It just made me think I was running super fast. I can't figure out why it happened on one of my 10 loops. When you get information that's incorrect when you think it should be correct it is a waste of your time

Back in February I ran 10 miles inside the park slope Armory. I'm not surprised the map came out looking like this I was under a roof. The satellites had to guess where I was. 

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