People of the Polka-dotted Persuasion

Measles, measles everywhere, and not a spot to be seen...

It is to the eternal regret of my mother that I was never fortunate enough to contract measles or chicken pox as a child. Try as she might to 'socialise' me with the neighbourhood kids (each of whom were scratching, blotchy messes), her little boy's immune system was ever-so strong, and curiously insusceptible to the contagious trials and tribulations of other little boys and girls.

With my now advanced age, my immune system (my defense against the mercurial temperament of mother nature and her occasional tantrums direct at my person) has taken a battering of late through a combination of self-induced insomnia and sustained, yet moderated, self-abuse of the alcoholic variety.

And so it is that I, with my less-than-perfect immune system, find myself in a city that is now in the midst of an outbreak of measles on many of the campuses of its many universities... while some might call this a curious coincidence, I'm inclined to attribute it to the continued collusion of the malevolent fates conspiring against me... Supporting my theory of a damnable and malicious cosmic force, I am further aided by the evidence that whilst other universities have shutdown, mine has done little more than send out a half-hearted email to students (of which I was apparently not on the mailing list, and had to have it forwarded to me by a friend) urging those inflicted with polka-dots to stay at home... the rest of us, I assume, can be damned...

Sensibility versus Sanity

My master plan was brilliantly devised and yet deceptively simple. The strategy that I had cleverly crafted in order to survive the IT orientation presentation today involved supplies (an assortment of foodstuffs and carbonated liquid refreshments), various reading materials (designed to offset the mental numbness that would undoubtedly ensue) and prior planned seating arrangements towards the very back of the room (located to leave me partially obscured by a pillar and the heads of my fellow audience members). Supplies in hand, I marched triumphant into the classroom.

Or rather, the empty classroom.

Or so I thought, until a solitary head popped out from behind the lectern. “Good,” the head proclaimed, “lets get started with the presentation, shall we?”

My instincts screamed at me to run: run far and run fast. Just as the Forest Gump music started to play in my mind, the neurons in my brain fired into action, and explained that if I didn’t stay, I’d be doomed to yet another year of not being able to access the internet at university – no email, no law database, no YouTube…

The head behind the lectern (which I later discovered was attached to an actual body) stared at me, perplexed. No doubt confused at my sudden onset of paralysis; oblivious to my inner turmoil; ignorant of the war that waged within between my intellect and my instincts – the opposing forces of sensibility and sanity…

Sensibility roared victorious: Sanity lay in tatters on the imaginary ground in my mind, limp and lifeless. I collapsed defeated in the nearest seat in the empty room, tears welling in my eyes.

“This is a table,” the bodied head exclaimed, pointing to a photo of what was indeed a table.
“You can put your laptop on this table. This is an internet connection. You can plug your laptop into the internet connection. In order to do so, however, you need a cable.”
A picture of a blue cable appears on the projector screen (see below). “But not this cable,” he cautioned, “this is the wrong type of cable. You need a different type of cable. Now this is a printer...”
The picture of the offending cable disappeared, and was replaced with a clipart cartoon representation of what could generously be called a printer. It’s really anyone’s guess what the correct cable might actually look like…

I think I died a little today.

----A picture of the offending cable----

Cats and dogs...

Cats... dogs... hell, I had the entire friggin' passenger list of Noah's Ark rain down on me on my way home from work today. As it turned out, not only did I return in a soggy mess, but much of the books and paperwork in my bag decided that they'd prefer to be paper mache, and so I've spent the better part of the past hour performing surgery on my university transcripts and lease agreement. I feel like I've missed my calling. I should have been a neurosurgeon.


Tomorrow, I have the insurmountable joy of sitting through what will no doubt be singularly the most mind-numbing experience of my life - a special ceremony for new students being admitted into the various graduate schools at my university. Attendance is mandatory, but my undivided attention is not, so, other students' and their parents' disapproving looks be damned, I'm taking a book with me to read ... and I haven't ruled out taking my iPod either...