Friday, October 12, 2007
Usual oatmeal breakfast plus yogurt. Cindy brought bagels today. Met with Eric 1-on-1. Prep for the white coat ceremony. During the rehearsal we discovered that Cole Hall had a ceiling leak—water was steadily dripping in due to the heavy rain that passed through today. The leak eventually stopped, and we heard later from Steaven that facilities management was all kinds of crazy because one person was out, one person was on vacation, and one person wasn't in today until 3 PM. Leaks all over the campus, people stuck in elevators (including a pregnant woman)—crazy! The ceremony went pretty well, from what I could see. It was our first big event in the newly renovated Cole Hall. Ben from IRTS magically appeared and gave me a crash course in using the lighting controls which are brand new. Some of the spotlights are not aimed properly, and he was not very helpful in getting them fixed (adjusted). For example, the spotlight on the podium points at the foot of the podium rather than at the person at the podium. He seemed to indicate it was someone else's job to adjust the spots, and I didn't feel comfortable doing that since it was a cramped space and I was in my suit and it was really someone else's work. Some light controls do nothing, he acknowledged. But he did teach me how to program the presets if I wanted to. Other problems: the ID plates on the seats aren't sealed down with glue, so you can lift the plate right out of its holder—indeed some chairs were missing their plates already. Also, the doors were not renovated—one falls open after you close it, and none of the doors have built-in stoppers so they cannot remain open when you have 700 people entering or leaving. Someone found 2 rubber stoppers, but it wasn't enough as there are 4 doors. Still, the new Cole Hall is a big improvement over the old Cole Hall. Dinner at home by myself: sandwich I packed for lunch but didn't have time to eat, some orzo salad. At 8:51 PM on Friday, October 11, we received a phone call and I let the answering machine pick it up. The call was from someone with a female voice who claimed to be "Terry Falcone" (variants for the search engine: Terri Falcone, Terry Falcone, Terri Falcony, Terry Falcony, Terri Falconi, Terry Falconi, Terri Valconi, Terry Valconi, Terri Valcone, Terry Valcone). "The following message is for Patrick Ryan. My name is Terry Falcone, and I'm calling from the transaction review department for [name of our credit union]. Please return our call. We can be reached at 1-800-622-1361. We are available to help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Thank you!" Our credit union doesn't have 24/7 service that I know of, so I was immediately suspicious and did a Google search on the phone number. In the results page, the word telemarketer appeared 5 times, the word security appeared twice, and the word fraud appeared once. Although this appeared to be a scam, I decided to follow up with my bank just to be certain. (See tomorrow for a followup.)