This is just a list of assignments I currently have pending to be handed in at university:

My Top Ten Pressing Deadlines

1. My formal lab report
2. A quantum mechanics/Maple assignment
3. A ‘physics in review’ assignment
4. A maths worksheet
5. Two C write ups
6. An oral presentation for lab
7. Paper Chase for lab
8. My lab book needs some work
9. Revision for the test every Wednesday
10. A thermodynamics assignment

Needless to say, this is not possible. Adam had to go and shout at the lab convenor until he gave the entire year group a three to four day extention on the lab report deadline. This was entirely justifyed. The lab report has to be done on an experiment performed before the deadline (obviously), and we have done precicely four experiments so far this year. One of them was “Mechanical Workshop”, which doesn’t count and you can’t do a report on it. If you’ve done the Astrophysics experiment, you can’t do that one either, and if you got bad results another time, you only have a choice of one. And you can’t do that one, because the cretin lab demonstrators have got your lab book because they can’t be bothered to mark it until the morning you need it again for lab! And he said he’d have it done days ago. I won’t go into what I think of his marking system here.

The lab convenor even had the nerve to suggest that had Adam started his report sooner he wouldn’t be in this mess. Adam calmly (I hope calmly; I wasn’t there) pointed out that that wasn’t possible, because of all the other work he had to do, and the fact that mechanical workshop had meant that he only finished the experiment he was reporting on the previous week.

While we’re on the subject of Mech Shop, the people in there this week already have all their experiments they can do the report on completed and marked. They also have their lab books. Why then, have they got an extra week to hand their reports in? What possible sense does that make?

When we went in to lab this morning, we noticed the deadline for reports had indeed been officially moved. Then they handed out something called the “Paper Chase”. This is, apparently, a search for pointless information to test our research skills. The first step in the Paper Chase reads as follows:

“Step 1 : If you are a Physics with Astrophysics student, this is the wrong script for you – obtain the correct one from the laboratory !”

Good start.

The maths worksheets have proved interesting lately. Our maths lecturer, having failed to turn up for our last lecture because he can’t tell the time, granted us a three day extention on the worksheet. This was on top of the eleven day extention he granted us last week. Then he, for some reason, put up an overhead sheet with answers to the next-but-one sheet, which we copied down. After that I asked for the second page of said answers. To my astonishment, they put that up as well.

That was an hour or two before the weekly test. It’s not really a test per se, more a sort of ‘farce’. There are three groups. The first has Dr. Adolf. He’s a nice guy, but a strict invigilator (ie. he invigilates properly). Our group has Dr. Brereton, who is genuinely no better at invigilating than a trained chimp. He sits and reads a book. He doesn’t look up at all. This is why Dick Steele can get away with writing all the equations on the whiteboard at the front of the room and referring to them throughout the exam.

I never do the Physics in Review prep questions (which, you may notice didn’t even make the top ten). To date, none of the lecturers have been stupid enough to ask me why not.

I was looking through the staff directory at University, with an aim to finding out an email address for one of our lecturers, when I was rather distracted by one of the entries. According to the website, there is a woman at the university called “Mrs. C. N. T. Bright Beginnings Childcare”. This has several worrying implications. The most obvious is that there is presumably a Mr. Bright Beginnings Childcare wandering around somewhere. The second is that, since if you do a little extra research you discover that this is in fact the phone extention for the Bright Beginnings Childcare Centre, the University’s child care unit is married. If you think this one through, though, Mrs. C. N. T. Bright Beginnings Childcare is probably not the childcare centre. She just married it. Mr. Bright Beginnings Childcare is a better place to drop your kids; Mrs. C. N. T. Bright Beginnings Childcare is probably the Earth Sciences building or something. I should go. It’s half past one in the morning, I have a ten o’clock start tommorow, and I think I’m about to overdose on surreality if I keep going.

(Title updated 20050502.)

Dave Gorman has been mentioned in two of the last three Columnists, and I feel I should get the rest of the story off my chest now. This last chapter concerns a student at my university called Dick Steele. (His name is actually Richard, but where’s the fun in that?) With only a week or two until Better World, all the tickets had naturally been snapped up. A fresher called Nadia (I don’t know her myself, but her breasts were the only things anyone seemed to talk about after the Physics Society party) hadn’t paid up. Dick wanted that ticket, and he wanted it bad. He figured that the best way to get hold of it would be to email Alisdair, who is president of the Physics Society, pretend to be Nadia, and suggest selling the ticket to him instead.

Not a dumb plan, you may think. However, you obviously haven’t taken into accout quite how dumb Dick can be. He wonders around looking like a gorilla in a zoo that doesn’t know what to do. He openly cheats in every exam he takes. He gets out notes and looks at them throughout. He actually tried to hide his equation sheet in exams it was allowed in. It has even been known for him to use a thousand-page textbook to help him in an exam. The only reason anyone can think of why he hasn’t been caught (other than the inexpert invigilation of a certain Dr. Brereton) is the fact that he fails the exams anyway.

He sent this email from his university account. It had his name, initials, department, and year of joining at the top.

Dick was not at Better World.

Alisdair, it appears, has an evil streak. He emailed ‘Nadia’ back to tell her that he wouldn’t feel comfortable, what with his inappropriate crush on Dick and everything.

Sometimes I get the feeling I’m living out a very eloborate sitcom. These things shouldn’t hapen in real life. You may have read in an earlier column that I recently went to see Dave Gorman’s Better World. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Dave before, but if you have, you may be entertained to know that, since Alistair reserved 21 tickets for the university’s Physics Society, there were, according to the ticket listings, twenty-one Alistair Griffins at the Dave Gorman show.

Richard witnessed the irony first hand when he got the wrong change in the Maths Department cafeteria.

I feel, that after the small taster in the last column, I should reveal the full story (as best I know it) of Adam’s Car. This could take a while, so I won’t go into the details of, say, why he wanted to drive to Essex in the first place*, but all that matters is that he made a very commendable attempt to drive there. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t seem to like him very much.

Now, I may have got some parts of this tale out of order; it’s easy enough to do, and I only really know most of this story via Adam, but I’ll try my best to keep it all in order. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, in many ways I’m glad it’s over. On Friday (which we have off university) myself and Adam thought we’d collaborate on some lab work. This, alas we not to be. Instead, I want to see Dave Gorman, and didn’t get to Adam’s until almost eleven. We didn’t get very much done. Even if we’d wanted to, the Absynthe had other ideas. So we met up again on Saturday. But we didn’t get much work done. Lee had invested in a Hungry Hippos set, and until you play it, you have no idea how great a drinking game it is.

On Sunday, we thought we’d better do some actual work. And we did. Well, I did. Adam couldn’t get his results, because the university FTP served wouldn’t work. (My results were on a disk Annie gave me.) This is fairly typical of Adam’s luck at the time. For example, he had to miss the following day at university to wait for hours for someone to bring round a spare set of keys for his hire car, which he had inadvertantly locked his set of keys inside whilst trying to knock a dent out of the boot from the inside, and which he was forced to drive by a walking stereotype who hit the back of his car and very probably wrote it off — except that there is still no reason to assume he had any insurance. Anyway, to be nice, I copied all his files from university onto my disk for him to use that evening.

True to form, it all went wrong. I had forgotten to delete my results from the disk first. We only noticed the error when he showed me his printout and the layout looked very familiar. Eventually, he used our results anyway.