Miriam Parkinson

Well that pretty much sums up my day. Spent my programming lab in c++ grateful for the fact that a modern private school education includes touch-typing as it definitely made taking note of all the useful tidbits the lecturer was writing on the board way faster and so I was able to quickly ascertain that the programming activities basically involved copying and pasting the examples from the lecture and changing a few bits. This left me plenty of time for what I should be doing now – the programming assignment (of which I am team leader – eek) which is due before 8.30am Wednesday. So basically I have tonight and tomorrow to integrate and debug my team-member’s modules into a single working and user-friendly program. Unfortunately this means I have to change the names of most of the #defines and function prototypes as nobody in my team considered the fact that everyone was going to have a ‘printResults’ function!

Anyways… Moving right along.

My structural mechanics lecturer wasted another hour of my time and a piece of paper which literally just has ’structural mechanics’ written on the top and the date. This is the second lecture in a row where all he has done is write out sample problems (copied from the book) of a variety which we could already solve last semester! I mean when a subject has a prerequisite the least the subject convener could do is to find out what we already know.

Finally was a maths lecture where we have switched lecturers from a dull and slow one with interesting eyebrows which shoot up whenever he talks, to an incredibly boring one with a shiny head and a pointy nose who likes to put transparencies of the textbook up on the projector and read off them for the whole lecture. To make this transition slightly worse we are moving from moderately interesting topics – functions of a complex variable – to an inordinately dull one – probability and statistics.

Anyways the upshot of this is that I’m actually better off not being there and just spending the lecture in the library as I can cover the same ground much faster than him so I spent the entire lesson chatting… Well, the entire lesson until the last 10min in which I was kicked out of the class because when I said the words ‘glow-in-the-dark underwear’ the entire class (male, about 150 of them) turned around and looked at me which sort-of drew attention to me…

I spent this newly freed-up time getting my textbook from the bookshop before the mad rush of class-changeover and bought myself the most wonderful new mechanical pencil. On my way back down the stairs to leave for the trainstation I bumped into a whole bunch of other people on their way to buy the textbook having remained in class for the final 10min and was called a rebel by 2 of them… Rebel indeed! If I was a rebel I would wear leather, take drugs and have promiscuous sex… Well two out of three isn’t bad I suppose.

The grand finale of my day was getting rained on as I left the train-station and then having to cross the road for my bus in the pouring rain and then walk home from the bus stop, also in the rain so I look like a drowned rat. Well a drowned rat in a bathrobe with toweled down hair now but you get the idea.

Anyways time to stop procrastinating and start working…

Cheerio