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to glad me with its soft black eye
Monday, 17 May 2010 03:51 pmI thought it was just the Return of the Revenge of Sid the Sinus Headache which is making me feel a bit fragile right now, but in fact it's probably also the gazelles. The end of term is always characterised by angst levels through the roof, and this year the crises seem particularly nasty and creative. In the last week I've seen two complete nervous breakdowns, three family deaths, the victim of a mugging and a student whose recovering heroin-addict boyfriend just had a relapse. I'm sure the issues weren't as baroque in my day. Oh, and there's also the interesting lad who made the fatal error of publishing a rather pointed attack on a rival university's rugby team in the student newspaper, creating an online furore which has subsequently gone viral, to the level of Facebook hate-pages and death threats. He's in hiding in Mpumalanga. You couldn't make this stuff up. I just wish he'd done it earlier in the term so I could have used him as an example in lectures. (Hmmm. Does this make me a bad person?)
In counterbalance to all this angst, we have, finally, after more put-offs and setbacks than one would have believed to be possible, a re-cabled house. The nice Telkom technician came back on Sunday morning and finished the rewiring. He then departed, whistling his merry cabling song, only for me to discover that he'd somehow managed to kill the ADSL connection with his fiddling. It refused to connect all day, and I finally phoned the nice Imaginet geekline late in the afternoon. They tinkered a bit, confirmed that the line was deader than the dodo and promised to log a call with Telkom. When we reeled home at 10ish from potjie and excessive booze with The Usual Suspects, the ADSL had quietly reconnected itself, suggesting that either (a) it simply needed an eight-hour run-up at it, (b) the vague fiddling by the nice Imaginet geek had dislodged some sort of blockage, or (c) the Imaginet black rituals included sacrificing a goat to the Telkom gods in order to make them actually do something in real rather than geological time. Either way, I'm not arguing, and I still want to know if my sweet Imaginet geeks are married.
Oh, and, nope, didn't finish marking the vampire papers. My gumption levels are very low at the moment. Also, my head hurts.
In counterbalance to all this angst, we have, finally, after more put-offs and setbacks than one would have believed to be possible, a re-cabled house. The nice Telkom technician came back on Sunday morning and finished the rewiring. He then departed, whistling his merry cabling song, only for me to discover that he'd somehow managed to kill the ADSL connection with his fiddling. It refused to connect all day, and I finally phoned the nice Imaginet geekline late in the afternoon. They tinkered a bit, confirmed that the line was deader than the dodo and promised to log a call with Telkom. When we reeled home at 10ish from potjie and excessive booze with The Usual Suspects, the ADSL had quietly reconnected itself, suggesting that either (a) it simply needed an eight-hour run-up at it, (b) the vague fiddling by the nice Imaginet geek had dislodged some sort of blockage, or (c) the Imaginet black rituals included sacrificing a goat to the Telkom gods in order to make them actually do something in real rather than geological time. Either way, I'm not arguing, and I still want to know if my sweet Imaginet geeks are married.
Oh, and, nope, didn't finish marking the vampire papers. My gumption levels are very low at the moment. Also, my head hurts.
