Okay, I've had the internet for a little while now, but still! Rejoice! Now I just need to get a TV aerial sorted so I can, y'know... watch TV.
My life has, as ever, been terribly interesting in my absence. I got a job (hurrah!), working in the Box Office of my university's student association/unions (I use the plural of union because my university thought the normal one-union-per-university deal wasn't good enough. We don't have one union. We have FOUR.)
Anyway, as I was saying - I have a job. Freshers' Week was last week, and I spent a lot of the week working on the box office, dealing with confused/arrogant/naive freshers. I sold freshers' passes, I sold tickets to freshers' week events, I collected lost property, I checked passes on the way in to club nights, I gave a ridiculous number of people directions (and since none of them came back claiming to be lost, I'm taking my direction giving as a success, and not so bad that the freshers got lost, never to be seen again). I dealt with language barriers between international students, I dealt with arrogant students who are clearly getting a bit above themselves now that they've moved out of their parents' houses and are in the big bad world of university (let the drinking commence and so on), I dealt with new students who had lost their keys/purse/phone/shoes/friends at evening events... I even collected a few interesting items in lost property. There were a rather nice pair of high heeled shoes (I resisted the urge to take them and claim ignorance of their existence), and a fold-up knife. I'm not sure who was bringing a fold-up knife into the students union. Naughty freshers. Must be a Glaswegian.
I also made friends with the security guys and got all the gossip - sneaky underage drinking (kicked out, banned for the night), students falling asleep after a few too many drinks (kicked out, banned for the night), some violence (kicked out, banned for the night), and so on.
Freshers' week is fun.
And now it's back to lectures. Not so exciting, but hey - it's fourth year, I get to choose every single one myself, nothing is compulsory, and I'm damn well going to enjoy my final year of undergraduate university life.
For your viewing pleasure, I'm going to do a recap of Edinburgh University's Freshers' Week:
- Thousands upon thousands of freshers from all continents of the world descending upon Auld Reekie and the fourth oldest university in Scotland (and sixth oldest in the UK. And by double checking this fact quickly, I just discovered the university motto: "Nec temere, nec timide" - or, "Neither rashly nor timidly". Nice.)
- Hundreds of lost freshers asking for directions.
- Coffee crawls, castle visits, Arthurs' Seat walks, campus tours, parliament visits, and so on...
- Lost property: a variety of coats, cardigans, and hoodies... A pair of shoes... A hat... A couple of purses/wallets... A couple of phones... About 5 student cards... A folding knife/plier type thing... A debit card...
- Property reported lost and never found: phones, freshers' passes, and a bag of champagne and roses (not a chance on that last one)
- Strange sights seen: apart from everything? I've seen people dressed as pokemon, wugs (it's a Linguistics thing), I've seen girls wearing fewer clothes than I would wear on the beach on holiday... Domestics in full view of security... Oh god, I can't list it all, I give up now.
- People taken to hospital/injured, to my knowledge: a fresher who trapped his hand in a door, bending the ring he was wearing out of shape so it couldn't be removed from his finger, leading to his finger swelling and him being shipped off to hospital. Also, a guy who was trying to lie down backwards as he was walked out of the building by security one night - my suspicion is that alcohol was not the culprit. A freshers' week volunteer developed a nasty rash which did not fade when a glass was pressed up against it; when ordered to go straight to hospital for fear of meningitis, the volunteer decided it would be a good idea to attend another activity first, and get to hospital later. I never heard what happened to him. And then there was me, on one of my evening shifts - I nearly collapsed and had to lie down on the floor at work and have my blood sugar levels tested (they were low). I was given coca cola, and the option to go home.
I'm sure I'll think of more later.
