Lecture Characters
By now you should all have settled into your course sufficiently to have made new friends and have a rough idea of who most people are on your course. If, however, you're a wuss like the Hattoners who all went to Glasgow all your friends will already be on your course, in which case this blog might not be so applicable to you.
What I'm getting at is by semester two you should be familiar with everyone who graces the lecture hall with their presence, and will likely have your very own mental list of the standout 'characters' on your course. I would like to take this opportunity to divulge the characters on my course:
Firstly, and to me the most prominent member on my course and always makes me chuckle, is weird always-late toastie loving lady. The name pretty much says it all; by some bizarre and illogical fate, weird always-late toastie loving lady is destined to enter the lecture almost precisely when she shouldn't. For example, the lecturer will ask rhetorically "... and who here amongst us can dispute his findings?", pausing for dramatic tension. The hall is shrouded in silence as the lecturer gathers his breath and opens his mouth to move onto the next crucial slide. It's at this most delicate of moments that the tubby, bumbling weird always-late toastie loving lady makes her grand entrance. Sheepishly pressing the door open, she stands in the corner, scanning the hall for her cohorts who are always punctual, in stark contrast to liability in the corner over there. Of course the lecturer doesn't want to continue until she crosses his path as she invariably has to; but she refuses to move until she spies her friends and then makes her way towards them. It cracks me up every time.
Weird always-late toastie loving lady is branded so because during one of our modules we had to give a talk on something with an ergonomic flaw. Instead of taking the routine 2-3 minutes that had been assigned to us all, weird always-late toastie loving lady took nigh on ten minutes to explain the intricate pros and cons of her trusty toastie-forming machine. I looked over at the lecturer who was trying hard to withhold her grin, in vain, who clearly felt awkward having to tell her to stop considering how long she'd spent on the slides. A collective groan reverberated around the room as she took her 15-point plus slide down to replace it with another exhaustive list of deficiencies inherent in her faithful toastie maker. She loved that toastie maker like it was a blood relative, I'm sure it's what makes her late for every lecture.
Next is the anally well-prepared Normans second from the front . This small tribe of nerds actually print out every single lecture and take notes beside the printouts. Fair dues, less work- but who the fuck is so meticulously prepared for a bloody lecture?! The average student is lucky if he can get out of bed for the bloody thing, let along take the laborious walk to the Pilkington library each morning to make copies of the lecture. In true Christie style, they arrange an assortment of pencils and pens around the desk perpendicular to magnetic North and in colour order according to the visible light spectrum. They scrawl every last word the lecturer says, and if any detail is missed a quick consultation with the adjacent Norman will reveal the exam-critical word. They don't harm anyone, but their mere presence sends chills down the average-working student like I who has to rely on substandard notes to get through the course. The Normans also meet regularly in the Human Sciences common room to compare notes and discuss the day's lecture.
I don't know if this is common for all courses or what, but certainly on mine there is no shortage of the inhumanly early pensioners at the very front. Perhaps it's a fear of fast walking students, but the pensioners are always a good ten to fifteen minutes early for every single lecture, even if they're back-to-back (lol). This scary dedication to being punctual stems, I suspect, from a morbid fear of not sitting at the front. Their age-battered eyes cannot hope to adjust to the screen from any distance further than the very front, and it's become the norm for the group of six to eight to occupy the front row with an aggressive display of perceived 'ownership'. The pensioners are also considerably too slow to jot down the lecturers words, and can often be heard mumbling complaints about the speed of speech these days and the price of cottage cheese.
Then there is the obnoxiously loud attention seeker, the sole person not to have left the vestiges of youth behind in high school. I'm all for having the odd joke here or there, but the obnoxiously loud attention seeker is a class stereotype not welcome at university- college is there for a reason, you dunce. He's often heard 'whispering' curiously loud smart-ass comments at the back, like "yeah, why doesn't the lecturer do the experiment!" Unfortunately for him all his goons have been diverted to their proper course in college, and as a consequence no one laughs or even reacts to what he says. It's amazing what happens when you take the 'school bully' stereotype out of education. But he gets his say on a good day, neglecting to raise his hand as is oh-so-common amongst these types and blurting out the occasional quip, like "that's not what mom would say!" in a water-boy styled voice. His voice, needless to say, is brash and loud all the while, being a right sore one on the ears even if you, like me, happen to place yourself as far away from him as possible.
Finally, I'm sure you're all familiar with the class hotty, or in psychology's case, the class hotties. It was a real novelty having the Frost twins at Butler, but to have them on your course... well, fate does deal a cruel hand to some (read it and weep Engineers!). Notorious pair in the field of running, I guess I get an unusual amount of exposure to them due to place, course and hobby. I'm sure you do have some hot people on your course, but I'm left with the question... are there two of them?
