power

My female owner just handed in an awful assignment today. She probably should have prayed about it instead of being so confident about writing a good piece of work. It was a research proposal for her thesis project. Her supervisor just got back to Brisbane last night and met her at 1400hr to go through her write-up with her. The thing is, the assignment was due at 1600hr.

His feedback (regarding design) threw her off-track and by the time the session was over, she had only 70mins to make conceptual changes (not correct typo errors type of changes). And she was in BIG PANIC.

Coz she had to perform a power analysis to get a ballpark sample size for the two studies she will be doing and to do that, she needed an online software. To use that software, she needed to download it first but as everyone knows, you can’t download programmes on school computers.. And she didn’t have time to go home (obviously). She needed to do that power analysis + remedy her proposal asap.

She tried sourcing for other softwares online that might not require a download and soon realised that she was fighting a losing battle. She smsed two of her coursemates who might be able to help… but they were not home. Then she fell back on (you guessed it!) good-old MSN to see if there was anyone online who might understand what she needed.

Lo and behold, her Intuitive Fren was innocently online minding his own cyber business. And very quickly, he became her online, real-time tech-cum-stats-data-generator. For some good reason (high IQ – intuitive quotient?), he was able to follow her vague instructions to i) download this software ii) choose the right test (??) iii) key in certain numbers in specific boxes to churn out the sample size she needed. To be honest, she wasn't even sure if he would be able to understand what she wanted, since the programme can be overwhelming for first-time users.

Happily, he was. In fact, he was patient enough to go through the various permutations she had in mind and like any good helpdesk, asked questions to clarify what her design was about. He even sent her a copy of the output to make sure that things were correct.

This was what he had to do for her, as quickly as possible, even though he was not familiar with the programme. Choose the right options, key in the right numbers to generate the right output.

Once again, my female owner was blessed by the help from her clever friends... Everyone, breathe easy now..