In January of 2007, I attended my first expository writing class at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. However, my day started earlier than that. I left Sarasota early for my Wednesday 11 AM class at USF-St. Pete. I encountered a few hurdles on the way to GEB4890-Strategic Decision Making. First, I was already half way to the Skyway bridge when i relaized that I had left my money on my bedroom dresser. I quickly turned around to retrive my money from my house full of frusteration, but lets face it I would rather be late than pay a fine for running a toll. Now I was behind schedule by at least 20 minutes, so I found myself acting like speed racer heading towards I-75. Fortunately, there was not too much traffic on I-75 North to 275 West on to exit 22 and a couple miles to campus.

The problem was that the only available spots were reserved for the boat club near the business club. I thought I could pass off as a memebr of the boat club, so i took the liberty to take advantage of one of the empty spots. Nonetheless, I was late to class and I was unable to find the ideal seat that comes with going to class early. Yada yada yada… was all that came out of my teachers mouth, since it was the first day of GEB4890, we only covered the syllabus and then we were dismissed. I was left with about 2.5 hours of free time before expository writing. I decided to venture into downtown St. Pete and the Baywalk area. In the midst of my expedition I decided to pull into a Publix/shopping center. I ended up finding a decent Chinese food place with really good prices. In fact, I got a full meal with bottled water for nearly the price of a Venti Starbucks coffee, imagine that. I also found some other places that I might visit with my friends or girlfriend on a weekend sometime.

I turned 2 hours of free time into an opportunity to grab a nice meal and check out some shops that might be of interest in the near future. By 2PM I was back on campus for expository writing. I did not know what to expect, but thought my teacher would be some old guy who just rambled on about writing all day so I was kind of dreading it, but maybe it would not be all that bad. By requirement, USF requires that business majors take an upper-level English class. I opted for expository writing, honestly, because it sounded better than the other choice, professional writing, I mean who wants to take professional writing? After the Professor,Trey, did a quick overview of the class, I was both relieved and confused. I was relieved that this class was not going to be the typical formal English class. However, I was confused about exactly what the hell a wiki was and what exactly we needed to do with it. After the first class, I went home immediately after class and tried to launch the website. Somehow I formed a new wiki,I figured "Oh great I broke somehting" and tunred off the computer in disapointment. The next class my anxiety was reduced because I realized that my problem was recording the course URL off of the board incorrectly. After that second class, I again went home and launched the correct website.

That night I feel like I did when I first made the website for our family business, Elite Electric Fireplaces. I had no idea what was up from down. My head began to hurt and felt like it was going to explode due to all the frustration. After a few hours, I felt a little bit more comfortable on the wiki. After the next couple of weeks, I found that the wiki was more user-friendly than not, and a lot easier to work with than Verizon’s. I can say that I have at least a white-belt with black stripes in wiki-ometry, or at least I am getting the website right now. Like the Chinese food restaurant and downtown St. Pete, I learned about the wiki through exploration, although the wiki isn't as delicious as Chinese food.