h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've had some trouble picking courses this semester. There's two very hard classes that I have to take, so I was trying to pick one that wouldn't be so difficult. I chose glacial geology- that can't be too hard, can it? Class started today at 10:10, in a building across campus. I was a little behind, but I arrived on time.

No one was there.

I waited ten minutes and started panicking. I went to the computer lab and looked up my schedule to send an "Oh-God-I-missed-the-first-class-I'll-be-good-from-now-on-I'm-sorry" email to the prof.

No one was listed as teaching the course.

After a ten minute walk back to Deike (cursing the class, the missing prof, my advisor, the registrar's office, and the grad program to get it out of my system), I went to the head of the graduate program's office and told her what happened. She pointed me in the right direction and suggested I sign up for some research credits instead. The undergrad affairs secretary (who is awesome) looked up the faculty spreadsheet for me. After a few tries, she found the prof that usually teaches it.

He is in Egypt for the semester.

Time to start sending some emails. My advisor is going to get an earful over this one.

Typical, the students are the last to know

Enjoy writing that e-mail, Scan!

On a similar note...

The other day in the library, we had some students ask us for directions to a specific room number in the building. None of us hadheard of it, but we checked their schedules and it was the room they'd been told to go to. Further investigation, consisting of staff roaming around and peering at all the door numbers, revealed that the number was actually that of the Gentlemen's Loos!

I remember that being the location for our final exam once before they changed the schedule...

it is a bit of a common joke at the begginning of semester about timetableing!

they never seem to look at the class list and the room before assigning people!
we had one module last year where half the class were told one room and the other half another room. bad start but then when the lecturer located the whole class he realised that we wouldnt fit into either room!

then the same group had a different lecturer later in the day and a different room. my bum hurt after spending an hour sat on the floor because there wasnt enough chairs to go round. there was about 20 of us on the floor!

Traveller in Time on top
"I guess the first dual room was about management . . .
And the hard floor about ergonomics. . . "

im about to show myself as a scientist here, what does ergonomics mean?

Ergonomics is concerned with movement and comfort and stuff. Something that's ergonomically designed is something that has been designed to fit the real shape of a person's hand or back, or refers to a workstation that fits with the way we work. Partly for comfort, and partly to optimise working.

so if the hard floor is about ergonomics then it was about making us work harder?


sorry if you ask me about science i get it straight away anything else it takes a while especially in the middle of exam time when this is my break from revision!

Guess what's happened now?

I was assigned a TA position with two of my friends. We are all in the same Math Modeling class.

I found out yesterday that three of the labs that we have to TA among the three of us all conflict with our Math Modeling lab (which none of us can get out of) and with each other. They won't move the MM lab, and if they try to move the labs we have to TA, there will be mutiny from the undergraduates.

I don't know what's going to happen here, but whatever it is, I'm covered by my contract.