school rant

It's a common misconception that the British love to queue up for stuff. And on the face of it, there is a great deal of empirical evidence that would support this hypothesis.

This idea is, of course, bunk.

The act of queuing is merely a means to an end. We like to queue because we like to complain. Queuing in supermarkets is the best. We can look at all the other queues moving quicker than ours and complain about that; we can complain about the person in front of us that has filled their basket exclusively with items that don't scan; we can complain about the fact that they only ever open up a new till after we've been queuing for a million years and it's finally our turn to be served; or we can complain about the old boy at the head of the queue that wants to pay for his shopping with a mixture of coupons, buttons and bits of fluff. We don't like queuing; we like grumbling.

Grumbling is our national pastime.

So please bear with me while I indulge in our national pastime and get my grump on. Here's a blow-by-blow/module-by-module account of how school has been giving me The Rage of late.

• Dynamics, Noise & Vibration.

Dr VC cannot teach. Fact. There's no doubt that he knows his stuff, and I'm sure that in his head it all makes perfect sense, but he is completely incapable of communicating it to anyone else. For most other subjects this isn't a problem; I can just go by the notes instead. But unfortunately Dr VC's notes are just the same deranged stream of consciousness... dig this;

"As indicated above, if the methods of theoretical modal analysis are applied to linear systems, all the methods used for 1-DOF systems can be applied, vis: (complex) algebraic or phasor (Argand) diagrams to obtain the Particular Integral (steady behaviour) for sinusoidal excitation, the foregoing (for sinusoidal) or "common sense" algebraic methods (for non-sinusoidal excitation) plus superposition of complementary function ("transient") and application of initial conditions can be used to obtain the complete the solution; alternatively the Duhamel integral (called the "convolution integral" by many American authors)."

Fuck you, Dr VC.

• Thermofluid Systems.

Okay, so there's three hours of Thermo each week. The first hour and a half is with Dr TM, teaching one topic. The next hour and a half is with RLF, teaching something else entirely. Then the following week, there's an hour and a half of computational fluid dynamics theory with CT, followed by an hour and a half of actual computation fluid dynamics. And then the next week it's back to the start again, and we all have to try and remember whatever it was Dr TM was banging on about a fortnight ago before our heads were filled with a bazillion different kinds of Thermo. WHY, IF YOU WANT TO TEACH PEOPLE ABOUT THERMOFLUID SYSTEMS, WOULD YOU CHOOSE TO DO IT LIKE THIS?!

• Operations and Quality Management.

This module is essentially one big group project.

(from www.toothpastefordinner.com - thanks Charlie Cat)

Group projects suck balls.

• Group Design.

Way back at the start of the year, a bundle of us came back from a year on industrial placements to discover that one of the bastard modules from the second year had been re-named and moved to the third year; which was a problem, since university rules prevent students from earning credits on the same module twice. So the module is cancelled, and the Group Design module is the half-arsed attempt to fill the gap.

And yes, it's another group project.

• Individual Project.

As the title suggests, this is an Individual Project. As such, everything that's going wrong with it is entirely my own doing. This does not make me feel any better at all, as it happens.

• Mechanics of Materials.

Seems to be going okay. I can only assume that some dreadful calamity will occur later in the year.

And yet despite all this, I find myself feeling somewhat slightly chipper of late. There must be something very wrong with me...

toronto-gosh

And so this week, I have mostly been playing about with a drainpipe filled with charcoal.

Allow me to explain.

We use a special fluorescent dye to check castings for minute surface defects; tiny cracks which, when subjected to repeated cyclic loading, will propagate and eventually result in the failure of the part. Apparently the days of just giving things a cursory glance and declaring that it'll probably do are long gone (unless you are a French car manufacturer).

The parts are dipped into a gigantic vat of dayglo goop, left to drain for a bit, and then the excess goop is washed off with a water gun. And then all the goop and all the water trickles off down the drain, where it goes on to make fish glow in the dark/die, and gets us in trouble with the environment agency. Clearly something must be done. Fortunately, there are a number of companies that can supply and install specially designed activated carbon filtration systems. So no problem, job done, right?

Wrong.

It's too expensive, they say. Explore other options, they say. And it's at this point that the project gets dumped on me. Looking for a different way around the problem, I notice that the dye has a lower density than water - it floats, and can be skimmed off. Brilliant! So I start researching such exciting innovations as parallel plate separators, draw up a few rough designs, think of ways to regulate the way that the dye is removed, and look up a few mojito recipes on the internets (I'll be needing victory cocktails when my genius plans come to fruition).

But when I present my ideas to the guys from our environmental department, they don't like it. They can't see how it can possibly work, even when I demonstrate using a bottle containing a mix of the dye and water. They want a filter, but they don't want to pay £40,000 for it. Can't we just put the water through a bucket filled with charcoal? That's got to be simple to do, right?

Sigh. Of course it isn't, for reasons too multitudinous and tediously boring to go into here. But they want a trial of our homemade filter to be up and running by the end of the week; and so on Friday I find myself standing in the finishing department with a three foot long piece of drainpipe filled with activated carbon granules, wondering how the hell they can expect this piece of crap to replicate the effects of a £40,000 filtration system.

For the trial, we pour 2 litres of dye and water mix into the top of the "filter". It's about 10% dye; you can tell, because the dye is floating on the surface of the water (grr). At first, it looks like all my cynicism is misplaced as 2 litres of water with little more than a few bits of charcoal in it drains out from the other end of the pipe. I'm feeling a little bit upset by this.

But wait! Another two litres go in, and the water coming out of the other end has just the tiniest hint of green to it.

Another two litres, and this time there's no hint - it's just fucking green. With a fat slice of dye on top. Yum.

Another two litres, and then another two, and the water coming out doesn't look any different to the water that's going in. This means we'll need to change the filter roughly every ten litres; or, to put it another way, fifty times every day. Turns out that the reason why £40,000 activated carbon filtration systems cost £40,000, is that THEY FUCKING WORK. Unlike our Blue Peter piece of shit drainpipe.

CYNICISM 1
OPTIMISM 0

Meanwhile... Beastmans.

This week, you get a double whammy of beastmans action; minotaurs PLUS chariots. This is because as attractive as they are on paper, neither is really that much to look at. Minotaurs first.



I run two units of these suckers (in addition to the lesser badasses that hang out with the Black Maul wielding Doombull). Smaller units of great weapon armed death monsters seem to be popular on the tournament circuit, and I can see why; but because I suck, I've never quite managed to get them to work for me.

The chariots, meanwhile, are just a complete no-brainer (until the Beasts book gets re-written and they become special choices, like what they should be).



I recycled the chariots from an old beastmans team for this army. The Ungor drivers were converted from the original (and fortuitously diminutive) Gor crewman, with just a simple head and weapon swap and a minor bit of green-stuffing.

Set phasers to suck

Customer: I got this for Christmas, and I don't really want it. Is it possible to get a refund?
Me: Certainly madam, no problem; there's is just a bit of paperwork to fill out. Because it wouldn't be fun without paperwork, would it?
Customer: Er... I suppose not...
Me: So, if you could just write your name at the top of this receipt, and sign at the bottom...
Customer: My name? What do you mean?
Me: Your name. That's who you are, madam. Write it just there, next to where it says "Customer Name"...

This is pretty much what life at the Big Gay Department Store has been like for the past few weeks. Also giving me the rage have been:

• The woman who tried to get a refund for an empty box, having forgotten to put the contents back into it before she left the house.
• The woman who tried to get a refund on items that she bought in an entirely different store.
• The couple who changed their minds four times when trying to decide where they wanted their new £1000 TV to be delivered to, each time requiring the whole transaction to processed again.
• The people who just stand in the middle of the escalators (our lives are short, and my lunch break even shorter; and I resent losing precious moments of each having t stare at a fat arse getting slowly fatter it's owner is TO LAZY TO CLIMB SOME FUCKING STAIRS).
• The jerk in the office that keeps putting me down on the rota for childrenswear.
• Newly married couples who want to refund EVERYTHING that was bought for them from their wedding list (I feel like saying to them that since they don't even seem able to agree on what kitchenware they want, their marriage is clearly going to fail very soon; and that when they each remarry, perhaps they should JUST ASK FOR FUCKING VOUCHERS).
• Me, every time I catch myself saying "PIN number" instead of just "PIN". Aargh!

Rant over. For now, at least.

Meanwhile, grown-up work has been slightly less farcical than usual (although we did have to endure an hour of mandatory health and safety training in which the floor was identified as a Fall Prevention System). I even got suckered into doing some vaguely important stuff at a two-day "Kaizen" meeting earlier this week. At first I was only there as the CAD bitch, to make layout changes on demand; but the guy that was supposed to represent Plant Engineering was off sick. The second choice person wasn't available, and nor were the third, fourth or fifth choices; even the Polish guy who changes the handtowels in the toilets was busy. So that meant it came down to me to point out such technical details as "you'll probably need some lights in that room, or something".

In other news, Fatty Mouse is unwell. Behold.

Those who find the above image too harrowing may prefer the artist's impression provided below, courtesy of The Boy.

It seems that something is causing irritation to little Blob-ra's wee snout, and so she has scratched it raw. Or maybe she is attempting to emulate Rudolph the Reindeer, so as to get into the festive spirit. Perhaps I shall make her some tiny antlers.

And finally, my former housemate Ruth became an ex-former housemate when she moved back into the Exeter Mafia Headquarters just before Christmas. Turns out that her boyfriend Sam that she had moved in with was perfect in every way, apart from being a clinically depressed Jehova's Witness forced to choose between his girl and his family. He chose... unwisely.

"Oh dear Ruth, that's a bit rubbish. How are you feeling about all that?"
"I'm a husk."
"High five!"

Fetid dingo’s kidneys

And so time creeps slowly by.

My day-to-day existence is captured almost perfectly in this picture.

By day, I paint toy soldiers; and by night, I drink until I slip into blissful unconsciousness on the sofa. There are many reasons for this; but mainly, I just don’t have anything better to do on the five days each week that I’m not working in the Big Gay Department Store. It also serves as a useful aid to procrastination… there’s still a lot of unpacking and organising to be done (even though we’ve been moved in for over a month now), and frankly the whole place could use a damn good clean up; but I just can’t see why I should bother. My two fattest and hairiest housemates are either unfussed about the general state of the place, or else completely oblivious to it. At least if Charlie Cat was here there’d be a chance of keeping it all tidy, and the offer of some help… but she’s still away having fun, somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire, bossing kids about and making them cry. I’m unwilling to stand alone against the tide of filth that follows in the wake of the other two (I’m pretty sure it would just be an exercise in futility anyway), and so I am having to grow accustomed to the ever increasing levels of squalor that surround me.

This is where the drinking comes in.

On the plus side, I got the preliminary results from my exams at the beginning of the week, and they were pretty good. Even the heinous Stress Analysis Exam Of DoomTM, which I thought that I might have to re-sit, yielded a relatively healthy 67%; and that was the worst of the results.

I also seem to have scored myself a placement, working for a company that makes turbine blades. It’s based some 75 miles away in Exeter, which is a bit of a pain; but it’s kind of relieving to know exactly what I will be doing next year.

So apart from wanting to murder most of my housemates, things aren’t going too badly for now.

red room

One of the nice things about living in a pub, is all the interesting people you get to meet.

Last weekend I woke up and wandered bleary-eyed into the living room, whereupon I discovered that an axe-murderer had spent the night sleeping on the sofa.

I exaggerate slightly; it was actually a claw hammer that this fellow used to kill his abusive father when he was fifteen. But it still caused me to ponder at some length, as I tried to work out the best way of telling an axe-murderer that he can't smoke in the flat...*

In the end, I resolved simply to make myself a cup of tea, clean out the mice and go back to bed.

In other news, my car is still AWOL... sort of. My insurance company has still not told me a damn thing about it, like where it is, whether I'll be getting back, or how much money they want to give me for it. However, I have had my tax disc and student parking permit posted to me by the good people at W.J. Furber, a car salvage and spares yard some 140 miles away in Shropshire.

Must play with mice... think happy thoughts... everyone's on fire...

*Disclaimer: Matt's actually an awesomely cool guy, if a little heavily medicated. My problem was more one of crippling politeness...

venting

Today was the last day of teaching for my second year of university. And on this last day, in the very last lecture (Industrial Fucking Control), we were given a list of the six topics that were the basis of the questions in the exam we are all due to sit in three weeks' time.

It was at this point that we discovered that we had not been taught one of these topics at all in the last year.

Imagine how impressed I was. Go on, just try and imagine.

This merely served to compound my rage. Less than an hour prior to this infuriating, yet depressingly unsurprising revelation, I received a text message from my insurance company telling me that I should contact their TOTAL LOSS team to help progress my claim... not a phone call, a fucking text message. At this point, I still have no idea where my car actually is, or what kind of condition it's in. When I spoke to the police initially, they told me that it had "some barrel damage and ignition damage", and that the recovery garage would phone me to tell me when it was ready to be collected/crushed into a tiny cube.

Of course, they didn't - they can charge by the day for storage, so why the hell would they want me to take my car away? I eventually got a phone number for these arseholes by going through various police departments, and duly passed this information on to my insurance company, who would provide free storage and do a full inspection. And now I have to phone their total loss team? Doesn't sound very encouraging to me. I still don't know where my car is. I don't know who's got it. I don't know if it's drivable. I don't know if it's repairable. I don't if I'm ever getting it back. I don't know if my stuff is still in it (my stuff consisting of a pair of glasses that make it relatively safe for me to be behind the wheel of a car, half a can of engine oil, some small change, and an emergency Mini Babybel cheese that has been living in the ashtray for some time). No one is telling me a fucking thing, and it is making me so angry that I cannot even maintain the pretense of proper fucking English fucking politeness.

The only thing that seems to cheer me up at the moment is imagining that everyone around me is on fire.



That, and my mice.