Welcome to 8:05 AM! I really do not like getting up early
after I stay up late. This is my fault and I like summer too much to be waking
up at this time. Sadly I have to do this because I want to be productive.
Anyways breakfast was quick and really only a transitional stage before heading
to the office. At the office I pulled up our survey and started working on the
corrections to fix it up. Peng said we should pilot the survey on people around
the campus so we had to fix it up and get 12 copies printed. Of course when we
printed it we found many small errors and formatting issues. At least this is
the point of having the trial run of the survey. Shoop and I each took 3
surveys and I left 6 with Stefan and Nick to take around campus. This survey is
basically our combined demographics and main survey for tenants in HMOs in the
Arboretum (the main survey simply asks more about their energy and
sustainability habits and energy meters etc). So I took the survey to the
student union building, but there weren’t any people there that could take the
survey. I then walked over to Firstpoint (basically a helpdesk) and asked one
of the women there kindly to take it and give me some feedback. I then walked
upstairs to the IT desk and had the woman there fill it out. She had no real
feedback on the form and filled it out in under 10 minutes! I had to stop back
several times with Firstpoint before the woman had finally completed the
survey, but she actually lived in the Arboretum so it was worth waiting to get
her feedback. Unfortunately she didn’t really have any feedback on the survey
but she did fill it out in entirety. After collecting the two surveys I had I
returned to the office and checked in with Shoop (who had been having several
other folks working on the survey). I also heard from Stefan and Nick about
their surveys (as they had one of the sandwich guys fill it out). They even had
a security guard fill out the survey and this dude had some serious issues
filling out the form (to the point of circling YES or NO at the top of a
checkbox column. -.-// such struggles). After I had all of the surveys back I
looked at all 10 we had filled out and worked through them page by page and put
the corrections into the updated survey file on my computer. We only had like
30 minutes until we had to leave at 11 for our meeting with City Council at
11:30. So I was racing through the surveys making the changes as quickly as
possible. We then dashed off to the dorms to drop off laptops etc and grab
bikes. I also luckily decided to grab two printed copies of the survey. We then
biked down there in about 15 minutes to city campus where we locked the bikes
and walked to the city council building. We tried to get into the front by
pushing the door button but it was not letting us in. We were about to pick up
the phone and call people inside, but then a woman came and opened up the door
and asked us who we were meeting. We had no idea as Katy and Peng had never
said so we had this awkward waiting time until we were let into the building.
We had all arrived in our bright orange Energize Worcester t-shirts too and
were ready to meet with whomever.
I trust that Driver!
Such food!
Mounds of chicken!
A little charcoal never killed nobody
Dat pasta!
I had so much food
Too early in that bright orange shirt
Eventually we were taken into the back conference room (the
same one that we had presented in last week) and waited in there for Katy and
Peng and the other council members. Paul even showed up for our meeting! Once
everyone was there we started talking about the progress of the project thus
far with EPC centralization and analysis of individual streets. We then talked
a bit about the letter we needed City Council to sign that we could carry
around in case of police activity or questioning residents. We also discussed
the workflow and what we needed to accomplish in the next few weeks. We then
talked about delivery of the survey and how to inform (warn?) people that we
would be walking around the area. Paul said the best way to accomplish this was
to leaflet drop (blitzkrieg) the region. We then went hard on the survey and
questions about that and other topics to include. Despite Shockey’s comments
yesterday we decided the best place for the demographics section was at the end
of the survey. I felt so proud that the council wanted to use my idea of which
brands do you know (organizations) and which organization has the most respect.
We had included this on one of our original surveys, but it had been dropped
over the multiple revisions. Despite the long meeting City Council did approve
of our work finally! So once we leaflet drop the region we can start our
survey!!!! After the main meeting we had an in depth talk with the woman from
the County Council and she went over quite a number of points on the survey. So
many revisions on this jawn! I feel like I’ve learned quite a bit about surveys
and wording and government work through this process already. After we left the
building we said we wanted to be back at the office by 2 PM. So I biked home
and had myself a Mug Shot (this time it was chicken flavoured (ß British of course) and
tasted just like the chicken Ramen noodles if there was a limited amount of
water so it became super creamy). It was delicious. I also finished my PB&J.
I headed back to the office and was there early with Shoop. We were then
waiting on Stefan and Nick who showed up a good 10 minutes late. We then had a
chat on how our team has been working and what we need to work on for the
project. The point of this was to get everyone on the same page with standards
and working on a document on the project as they have not always been 100%
focused on this and play on their computers or tablets or phones. It is
irritating as I have to constantly ask them their opinion to keep them engaged.
It only make everything worse. I don’t think I quite went about the talk the
right was and I think Stefan was annoyed with me. I’m just trying to get
everyone on the same level and have everyone contributing. What also annoys me
is that certain teammates are completely unwilling to work on the weekends at
all (without taking time out of the week). Sure we are not supposed to work on
the weekends, but we need to sometimes get a bit more done before we can start
doing the weekly work (such as revising our paper). At any rate I gave Stefan
and Nick the leaflet to work on and I asked Shoop to draft the letter for us to
carry around. I just dove into the survey and corrected everything as much as
possible with the City Council recommendations, Peng’s recommendations and the
results of our pilot surveys. Whew. It took me so long to format everything and
get all the corrections made. We then called Peng in and he, Shoop and I went
line by line on the survey through every question. After another hour and a
half we finally had gone through everything and the new survey looked really
quite good. We then sent it off to everyone. We also went through the leaflet
and letter with Peng and got those fixed up. After all of this we talked to
Katy and got about 100 of the leaflets printed. Shoop and I stayed another hour
or so to help Katy and talk to her about the documents. Katy also had given us
another piece of technology to play with that is a clip on in-home display from
British gas! So I’m excited for that. After the printing we headed back to the
dorms in the dumping rain. I then took a nap (finally!) and it had stopped
raining when I woke up. I rode to Sainsbury’s and dropped mad money. So I
bought about £30 worth of food (almost $60) and got everything from corn to
shredded cheese to lunchmeat to toast to milk to 3L of OJ to yogurt to 40 tea
bags for 15 pence (fair trade of course) to more Mug Shots to good chicken to
salmon. So much food! It was also strange because I saw one of the council
women at the store. I have so much food now! At any rate I had to bike and then
got ready to start cooking food. Marceli came over and cooked pasta while I
went hard cooking so much chicken. She made this really good penne and lasagna
sauce with sliced peppers pasta. I cooked much chicken and managed to make the kitchen
slightly smoky too! (I’m getting better at cooking chicken I swear). After that
she and I watched Superbad which is actually like the worst movie ever. It has
the dude from Scott Pilgrim in it with Dave Franco (cameo), Jonah Hill and Seth
Rogan. It’s just about really angsty teenagers and Jonah Hill being a jerk.
Anyways after that it was chill. I drank a good 1L of orange juice last night
and had so much food. Wow.
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