that would be an advanced support question

Well, that was lateral! The campus power supply died, without warning, at about 12.30 today. I have now cleared out my in-box, thrown away all the out-of-date bits of paper, filed the rest obsessively, labelled and ordered all the files, started two absolutely new ones, polished my miraculously clear desk, and read Bleak House for an hour. The power's still out. I'm absolutely out of legitimate work I can do without a computer. Even the students seem to have departed campus in droves, possibly spooked by all the darkened lecture theatres. I consequently trickled off home, where at least I can deal with email queries for a virtuous hour or so.

When not dogged by power cuts, and possibly as an anodyne to this continual gosh-darned student advice, I've become addicted to Not Always Right. While I darkly suspect, on the grounds that the human race is too stupid to live if they're all real, that a good half of these incidents are either wanton inventions or prank calls, I am frequently struck by the lateral ingenuity of their inventiveness. The Hobbit-acquisition process frankly isn't a patch on this one, unless I simply haven't noticed that he's actually a small, particularly sluttish Bengal tiger. Also, this one and this other one were clearly written by Monty Python. Oh, and pr0n.