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Dreadful Nonsense

"I've read your blog. it's really funny. you should write a column." - Jon Ronson

Hi! My Name Is [please insert]

Oh, you guys. It's just not working out as well as I had hoped it would.

You know what it's like. You're away from home and staying in a strange place. You've got timetables that include events entitled "Ice Breaker" and "Disco" and "Quiz Night" that you're not obliged to attend, but attendance is strongly encouraged. You have to wear your name on a badge, and the badge must be displayed in a very obvious place about your person and not, as I had hoped, in your back pocket. You are literally colour coded (I'm in the big purple group, and in the green sub-group of the big purple group). You start to wonder if this is all real.

So summer school hasn't started off so well. First there was the discovery that I'm in one of the worst blocks of accomodation on campus - which is fine in itself, if a bit too similar to the place I lived in my first year of university which was, I think, one of the worst years of my life (uni for me got so much better in second and third year once I moved off campus). Then the discovery that one of the showers isn't working, which means that there's one shower between 12 of us. Then, the traipsing around the campus trying to find various buildings. Turning up at one, only to be told we should be at another. Turning up at the another building, only to be told to go to a third as yet unspecified building. Deciding the follow the group to a fourth building, being told to wait in a corridor, waiting in said corridor until we are led back to the first building, and then asked where our timetables were, because we should have them already, and aren't we supposed to be in the second building by now?

Gordon blimey, boys and girls, it's been a stressful first 24 hours. I'm currently sitting in a tiny, very dark and very cold room, cast in the shadow of a massive tree that is blocking all of the bright shining sunlight from entering, and leaving me shivering in the near-darkness as I redesign once again an experiment I've been redesigning now for about two months and that I'm supposed to be running, on my own, tomorrow, on up to 24 unsuspecting participants. I'm not happy because (1) my bed's too small, (2) I don't like it here and (3) I want to go home.

Someone please come take me home. Many sobbing thanks.


This entry was posted on 08 July 2007 at 10:27 am. 0 comments

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