Diary of an up and coming sociopath

I’ll talk a little about Wednesday. See, on Wednesday we went to all of our lectures and practicals. That’s a rare thing, though we usually do it in the first weeks so we can decide if and when to turn up to things. Our first practical really took the biscuited goods, though. The title was “Software Project Management” and yes, it’s about as interesting as it sounds. The point of the practical (and this is where things get confusing) was: To plan a project to present the choices of project planning software to the project leaders. Mmmm. Metaprojectual. Planning a project about project planning. We found it incredibly mirthful and Ian, George and I pulled out every trendy management buzzword we could think of to make our project plan the most obscene parody of middle-management everywhere. We were consumed with laughter at our Dilbert-style lampooning of the subject, a sadistic glint in each of our formerly apathetic eyes. The lecturer walked around and told us we were doing a good job.

Later, I drew him into a conversation about milk. We were discussing whether to model on our plan, time spent around waiting. We figured 3 days of waiting for forms to arrive was adequate, but was it an activity that needed to be modelled? We discussed it with the guy taking the class, and we suggested that if non-activities were modelled, so should tea-making activities. Then we descided to deconstruct and plan the tea-drinking process and I appointed myself head of a committee in charge of purchasing dairy and non-dairy products to research, specifically, the various kinds of milk. Then I pointed out that UHT milk was disgusting and this paragraph comes full circle.

After that, we went and sat around in the food hall for a bit, and discussed how we could intentionally annoy certain lecturers by thrusting forms at them in their lunch periods, as we had managed to do back during the days of project registration. Later, we headed off to our first “e-business” period, which was again, just pure hilarity. The room was packed, moreso than I’d ever seen any computing lecture filled. The guy at the front said “I expect most of you are here because you think it’ll be an easy pass” and in my case, the only defense to that was, “Well, you sure got our number.” I overheard a female business student remark “Wow, there’re a lot of blokes doing this module.” Welcome to computing. Please leave your excess estrogen at the door. Then the guy starting talking which was less fun because he spent a good 5 minutes describing his choice of clipart for one slide. Luckily, it was only an hour long and it flew by. If I had more 1-hour lectures, things would be really bearable around here.