Diary of an up and coming sociopath

As ever, wednesday comes, and with it comes the promise of lectures. I managed to be awake well before Ian came to knock on my door to check if I was awake, which was retty amazing in itself, and we were early for the bus. Early in a “short conversation at the bus stop” way rather than a “reaching the bus stop before the bus has turned the corner” way. It seemed, as the morning sun beat down upon the bleary Wheatley campus, that there might be some hope left in the day yet. There’s nothing so convincing as 2 hours of being talked at about a subject as incomprehensible as the mathematics of software project management. It sure as hell convinced me that I had better things to be doing today. I mnea, technically, it was only an hour an a half, but the man himself said - “My, this just keep on going.” Understatement of the century, methinks. Software project management keeps on going like the energiser bunny on viagra. I can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t ease the pain if we were actually called upon to do anything in these practicals, but we didn’t even have a question asked of us today. When the practicals contain no practicing, I start to question why we even go. I could’ve read the lecture slides myself, to be honest. I don’t need a bunch of qualifications and the title of “lecturer” to do that.

It was perhaps an incredibly irony of fate, then, that following a particularly embittering morning of tutoring, we were seized upon to fill out a questionnaire for the University’s latest audit. It asked some incredibly relevant questions, and certainly clarified a few things in my mind. For instance, question 32: Do I get a chance to give my opinion about my course? Strongly Agree! We do one of those crappy module assessment forms for most of them. Question 33: Do you feel like your opinion leads to any changes? Strongly Disagree. I can honestly say out of all the times I’ve handed in a module form, not once has any tangible difference been evident. I took the opportunity for the first 2 years of Uni, all the times I could, to complain about being unable to access the U: from home, only to discover midway through the second term of year 2, that the feature was already available, it’s just that no-one currently employed knew it was possible. It wasn’t in the intranet documentation, it wasn’t in the computing handbook, in fact, I’m still not certain how I even came by the knowledge. After that, I made a point of putting down that a bigger deal should be made of the fact that you don’t have to come into Uni to get your work off the intranet, but still, no sign of anyone caring. I remember taking ample opportunity to explain just why their new overpriced and unreliable bus service was failing to meet the needs of students like me and my friends, and that’s because it was previously free and unreliable. They thought that by buying shiny new buses and charging us all a practically compulsory (literally, next year) hundred quid or so to use them, without actually improving the reliability of the service or disposition of the drivers, we’d somehow be more inclined to hop on the damn things. Never received a reply from that, and their response was to just band car parking at Wheatley, which didn’t work. So they got yellow lines painted outside the campus. So now students are pratically parking in people’s gardens and everyone involved is getting mighty annoyed. I just can’t imagine who thinks up these beauraucratic nightmares.

Still, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. We spent the afternoon watching cartoons. On Tuesday I went into town with Ian, to buy the new Ash album, and to put a cheque in the bank. I totally forgot abot the latter, though I got the album fine. Ian was still primed from the console rumours of recently to go and buy himself some console, so he was looking and second hand stuff, which is how we somehow ended up meeting Rachel. I wouldn’t have placed her in a computer game store, especially, but she was there looking for Seb, who walked past us just as we parted ways with her. I felt an incredibly urge to cry out “Hey, I recognise him from the internet!” but that would’ve just been…awkward. I was planning to walk into town, since I don’t have anything better to do with my time while Nikki’s not around, but Ian was still crippled from laser quest the other day so we just got the bus. Still, the godd intentions were there. Carve that on my gravestone, or something.