Disillusionist
I’m not sure if this happens to everyone, but I seem to completely dissociate lecturers, teachers, lab demonstrators and tutors from the real world. They seem to me to be completely cut off from reality, people created just to taunt you with their superior knowledge (and assignments) and things without a social life or any place in the day-to-day running of society. I realise this is a somewhat solipsistic view of the world, but it gets me through the day okay.
Anyway, I digress, today I finally managed to see that one of my project supervisors has a life outside of UofM, and this shocked me. Not only does this person have a wife (God forbid!) but also two (not one, but two) children. Riding in my supervisor’s car, among the baby seats and the general family-car-sensible-ness (I think it was a Toyota Corolla or something similar), it finally hit home that academic staff do have a life outside of university. They don’t all have IQs over 190 and have a reaction to kryptonite. Some of them are vaguely normal and, ultimately, human! Of course there are the special breed that really do have no social life and live to torment students, but I think perhaps they are in the minority.
April 14th, 2007 at 3:56 am
Yes, your view is somewhat solipsistic (good word, btw… I might start using it) but I am glad to hear that it’s changing. It’s nice to know that they are human too. I think that I must go to an extraordinary school, where we actually work (in the real world) and go out drinking and all sorts of stuff with our professors and TA’s and the like. Sometimes they even pick up the tab… sweet. And a lot of the time, you find out some juicy gossip.
April 14th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
*scratches head*
Arent you a lab demonstrator will?
April 14th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
You always are a one for juicy gossip, and someone picking up the tab Sach!
Yes Pete, yes I am a lab demonstrator. And I’d guess that my students don’t think I have a real life either. Of course, they’d be right, but that’s not really the point here.
April 14th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
It’s ok Will, you are not alone….
*Goes back to spending Saturday night abusing MATLAB*
April 16th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
hell no…
switches back to matlab after spending weekend in sydney
April 18th, 2007 at 1:36 am
Will.. a few weeks prior to this, and I would have thought you were describing a certain lecturer who i shall name Z. i could just picture it … the stereotypical.. computer geek who lives off the pleasure of tormenting his students…
I picture Z a s a person who would remain in his office unless he was needed in a lecture theater, and when he was ready, he would go home to his tank of plastic fish -when he tried keeping live fish, they kept dying on him…
He then clambers into his giant chair and hunches over his desk at the monitor. To his right, would be a half empty can of soft drink with the straw inserted, and a pile of junk food wrappers littering the floor next to the computer.
Once he was nestled in, he would then commence to program away, chuckling to himself occasionally upon the though of his OS tormented students…
From a distance, you would simply see the the silhouette of a man with a beard and no neck, hunched over in front of the monitor, which was emitting the only source of light in his dingy room.
But even he has a “secret” life - one beyond the programming monitor.
I only say this because earlier this semester, a friend of mine.. lets call him X, spotted the man in question exiting a club x…. i think this needs no further explanation. Needless to say.. i can never look at him the same way again…well… to be honest… i still think of him in the same way…. ..just… add a little detour on the way home…
April 18th, 2007 at 3:24 am
I just need to be employed as a demonstrator of sorts, and I’ll fit perfectly among the ranks of the current ones.
I love my computer
April 19th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
X, Z what are these things, god, Oh Bloody hell… what happens here… whose blog it this? What? No i don’t want a turnip…
May 30th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Oh wait. Yes, I have. I’m sorry, but I just don’t have it in me right now to type it all out again. Besides, it was just ramblings anyway. You didn’t want to hear me go on and on about this, right?
May 31st, 2007 at 12:11 am
My first reaction to the above comment was that it was spam. But it actually involved English words, and a sentence of some variety. Not only that, but it seems to link to a website that isn’t trying to sell me drugs or porn. But it’s such a random comment, and phrased like it’s replying to something (God only knows what) that it must be spam. I’m confused!
The fact that the IP address is from Romania doesn’t help the comment’s non-sam status at all either.