Posts Tagged ‘Uni’

Teaquilibrium

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

So Hayley’s recent post about TQ (tea quota) reminded me of my theory of Teaquilibrium.

Teaquilibrium is the balance of tea in your body to everything else. Whatever you consume could reduce the teaquilibrium, so be careful!

I obtain teaquilibrium with two cups of tea first thing in the morning. I am completely useless without them. What if I have some breakfast though, and have orange juice with it? Uh oh, the ratio of orange to tea has changed. Another cuppa is called for. But I don’t usually have time, so I spend forty minutes on the bus below teaquilibrium.

When I arrive at uni, I immediately go to Costa for a large cup of hot water, into which I add my own teabags (money saving tip right there, students – hot water costs 20p). Thusly, teaquilibrium is restored. I’ll have two hours of lessons in the morning, which is not an acceptable amount of time to be tealess for, so I need to get another medium tea to take into the first lesson.

On exiting the second, tea is needed straight away to restore teaqulibrium. But what if I had a bottle of water as well? OK, then a large tea, or maybe two medium teas, is called for.

Sometimes I’ll have coffee instead. Now, coffee is a special case – it only changes the tea ratio by half of what any other drink does. So two cups of coffee = one cup of tea (although in terms of caffeine, two coffees is about twenty teas). So for each coffee I need to replace it later with half a cup of tea.

This continues throughout the day, with the last cup of tea coming around 8pm. If I go out drinking, then all the caffeine in the various cokes and Red Bulls helps maintain the tea levels, at least until breaking the seal occurs, usually after about six drinks. Then you panic – you can’t order a cup of tea in a pub (usually) on a Friday night – so tea balance will be out of whack until you get home.

Luckily, there’s nothing like three cups of tea with some cigarettes to sober you up just enough to go to be without the room spinning. Thusly, teaquilibrium is restored once again and you go to bed happy, ready to begin again tomorrow.

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Busy Busy Busy

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Well, we finished uni nearly two weeks ago and I have got precious little done.

The first week was spent at the all-singing all-dancing all-new Ernulf – sorry, Caffe Zest at One Leisure. The re-incarnation of the old bar promised to be busy and good fun, even if it did have a roomful of screaming kids next door, guaranteed, at all times, by the soft play area.

Hours and hours of cleaning and getting “stuff” ready resulted in me, well, leaving at the end of the week – a lengthy story which I shall recount, erm, tomorrow or something.

Thursday day and night involved Alex, Russell, alcohol and fun times (the less said about the fallout the following day, the better). Good Friday saw me and Alex rather sickly-looking and boarding an old X5 to take us into Cambridge – she to meet Russell, me to meet Julie. That evening, went out with a lot of Julie’s friends to The Regal, where they insist on always going even though it is absolutely fucking awful.

A weekend of doing really very little, barely moving from the extremely comfortable sofa, followed. Ah to be rich and be able to laze around all day at will!

This week, me and Ben, and from tomorrow Marcus, are helping Rita from next door (to our old house) clean out her long-neglected garden, pull up weeds, fix fences and trellises and greenhouses, and shift three bedrooms’ worth of forty years’ worth of accumulated junk, erm, around. Today mainly involved driving a rented Transit around all day backwards and forwards to the tip, and hey, you know I love a van.

In between this and finding spiffy animal stories for a site I’m helping to run at the moment, AND writing bits of my 6000-word assignment, I really haven’t had time for much else. I haven’t cycled for ages, except to town and back; I haven’t cooked properly all week, I’ve been eating absolute shit and I feel ill.

Brilliant Easter holidays then, AND I only got one fucking Easter egg! The cheek!

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Mobile Phones By Nationality

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Over the past few months at ARU, I’ve noticed that – generally speaking – certain national groups seem to have certain mobile phones.

I wonder if this is a trend which can be exploited when marketing contract deals to international students?

English: iPhone, “Poor Man’s iPhone” (Nokia 5800 etc), other touch-screen phones.
Arabic: Blackberry. Every single person I have met from the Middle East has one, no exceptions. I fucking hate Blackberries.
Western European: iPhone or bottom-of-range cheap Nokias and Alcatels. Seems to be no middle ground.
Eastern Europe: Boys: compact but powerful LG’s and Samsungs. Girls: “Designer Series” phones.
Scandinavia: Slimmest width possible. Some of these phones are really fucking bulky but only a centimetre across. Odd. Surprising lack of Nokias considering that’s their biggest market.
Chinese & other oriental: Tiny little Samsungs that double as the kitchen sink. iPhones in unusual colours.
American: iPhone, pretty much as exclusively as the Arabic Blackberry.

Interesting.

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I Am Still Unemployed. Sort Of.

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

I’m becoming increasingly disillusioned with finding a job. And I need one, cos I am skint.

There are few part-time jobs around at the moment, which considering how many there were when I was looking for full-time is a bit annoying. If I get a job in a shop or a bar or something in St Neots, then it’ll be hard to find one who can make my hours flexible when my uni timetable changes. Which theoretically should be twice a year but at the moment seems to be about every nine days.

Also, relying on a bus to get me home on time means I can’t guarantee I’ll be in St Neots when needed. The other day, I finished uni just before six and hurried to Bay 16 to find over 100 people waiting for the Mighty X5. In the rain. With 48 seats on each but, this would have meant waiting in the rain until at least the 7.10. Which I wasn’t really feeling. (more…)

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Viewable

Monday, February 8th, 2010

After months of searching through Gumtree et al to find somewhere to live in Cambridge, I am going tonight to look at a double room in a shared house in the wastelands between Mill Road and Cherry Hinton Road, somewhere behind Cambridge Leisure.

It’s not a student house, it’s not a bedsit, it’s ten minutes from uni and it’s CHEAP – £90pw all in. Which is GOOD.

But I am having doubts now. As much as I hate getting the X5 every day (although if you have to get a bus every day, the mightiness of the X5 means it isn’t quite so arduous), and want to be closer to uni, able to get a job in Cambridge without being constrained by buses etc., I wonder whether I would miss the security of “my flat”, and whether I am ready to leave St Neots for a third time.

St Neots is great; most of my friends are there, little brother is there, it’s handy for getting into not just Cambridge but also Peterborough, Bedford, London etc.

More than anything though, despite the fact I share a flat, it’s very much “my” place. I can do what I want when I want. I have all my crap spread all over the place, I can have who I want round when I want – I don’t have to live by someone else’s rules. It’s a selfish thing basically. Could I live by someone else’s rules?

So I am going to look at this room in CB1 today, and will keep the following in my mind. If it’s truly an amazing place, I’ll seriously think about moving. But anything less, I’m going to stay where I am, at least for the time being.

There’ll be other places. And £90pw does seem a little TOO good to be true…

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D Is For Decade

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

It’s only just struck me that in two and a half weeks’ time, we’ll be entering a new decade.

This is the third time I’ve done this, although only the second time it actually occurs to me that it’s a little bit more than another Christmas holiday, on account of me being six when we rolled from ’89 to ’90.

And as I was discussing with associate Phil the other day, we’ll soon have to start including the “nineteen” when we talk about the past. “The twenties” has always meant the 1920′s, but in another ten years we’ll be entering the twenties ourselves, and saying 2020′s sounds a bit awkward as a term for the whole ten years – of course, “the 2000′s” sounded odd which led to people referring to “the noughties”, which I absolutely fucking hate. This will become more noticeable in a few years’ time, when people refer back to the first measurable slice of the 21st century, and aren’t really sure how to phrase it.

Unfortunately, i didn’t really achieve much in the last ten years. The decade started with me dropping out of Sixth Form, where I would have been part of the year group taking the last old-style A-levels ever. I learnt to drive. I got a full-time job with a company who went bust after six weeks and didn’t pay me, then shifted myself down to That London for a couple of years. After I came back, I lived at home for a bit, then with Alex, Paul and Magee in scummy Potton Road and posh Emery Place, then back at home. I worked for a prison and a tea company before joining BP as a part-time till-tart, then going full-time, then being an assistant manager for a bit, then… leaving. (more…)

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1000 Words

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

I wondered if I could write 1000 words, about nothing in particular, in fifteen minutes.

Write or Die is a great little tool which tells you your wordcount in one corner… and time to write in the other. Pause for too long, the screen goes red and you need to SPEED UP! Pause a bit longer and it starts DELETING what you’ve written.

Picture 2
But what to write 1000 words on in fifteen minutes? No time to think or plan reall, no time to go back and edit what I’ve done. No time to try to reach a sensible conclusion. But so far, I’m just filling space, and that isn’t the aim of this exercise! (Write or Die does allow you to click “pause”, but that kind of feels like cheating… It only works once though.)

Have just finished the usual supposed-to-be-three-hours workshop class that I have every Wednesday afternoon. Like most of my classes, it seems to have disintegrated rather quickly, and only around ten people remain.

There’s about four of us from the UK. Then there is Fatmir from Kosovo, Neda from Iran or French Angola or something, Bandar from Saudi, one Portuguese girl, and a couple of others I’m not so sure about. (more…)

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Student Finance You Fucking Geniuses*

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

A few weeks ago, I rang Student Finance to enquire as to why I had only been processed for a maintenance loan, and not the grant I’m also entitled to – being, as I am, old.

They told me that there was something wrong with my application – namely that I’d done it wrong. But don’t worry, they said, this’ll be easy to fix.

“You need to send in three years’ P60′s to our Darlington office, along with a letter explaining your circumstances. If you can’t get a P60 for any of those years, get the employer to write a letter confirming your earnings for that tax year, and noting that they cannot issue a substitute P60. They must include their PAYE number, your payroll number, and National Insurance number.

“The assessment should take about six weeks. We won’t know if they are processing your application until the outcome is decided. Seeing as you have been working or on benefits for the past three years, there shouldn’t be a problem.

“If they require more information they will write to you, but there is a backlog and this can take an additional week.

“If you have to send in more information, the process may have to start again from the beginning.”

So I did all of the above. I dug through seven or eight boxes of crap for P60′s from the various employers I’ve had since YE04/07 – about eight, seeing as I temped through different agencies for a lot of that. I called BP for a copy of 04/07. I called MMRG for 04/08. I called various different temp agencies for 04/09, and got a statement of earnings for 04/10 so far, just to be on the safe side.

I sent in the extra information they said they MAY need – bank statements, utility bills, support notification, letters from HMRC from when I was unemployed, etc – just in case they asked for it later.

I have heard nothing.

Today, down to my last £100, I called them. Any progress? “Well, we can’t actually see anything until the assessment process is finished. Did you send your P60′s?”
“Yes.”
“Did you send [everything else, listed one by one]?”
“Yes.”
“Hang on… you’re 26?”
“Yes…”
“Oh. Just send a signed letter saying you want a grant, and you’ll have it in about six weeks. You don’t need to send in anything else, because you are over 25.”

“……………”

At least I know I’ll get it now, but not being able to even track the progress is a bit annoying. Of course, ten years ago you wouldn’t expect to be able to track the process of ANYTHING, especially not online. But this is the so-called digital age, and I want my information up to date, at my fingertips, RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

Overall, though, I think, a win.

*Geniuses or Genii?

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So… uni then…

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I’ve now been at ARU for a month and am not enjoying it any more than I was.

I’m not gonna whinge about the amount of work, because really it’s no more than working full-time and in fact is often less. I’m not gonna whinge about all the twats around campus because I don’t socialise with them. No, I’m going to have a moan about travelling.

Because of the times my lectures start, I’m on the X5 during rush-hour most days of the week. When I worked at booking.com, it was the summer holidays so even if you got the 8.09 bus you were in Cambo just before 9. Now everyone’s back and the traffic is ridiculous. So for a 9am start I have to get the 7.09 bus and I still only scrape in on time, so I’m reduced to getting the fucking 6.39 bus – which gets to Cambridge in 35 minutes so I have to kill a load of time. Now, I’m all for spending less time on the bus itself, but that’s ridiculous.

I need some sort of transport. I can’t afford a car. It’s too far to bike. I could get some sort of scooter, but as Julie so rightly pointed out, I’d die. The thing that annoys me most is that the journey robs me of two to three hours a day when I could be doing some work, leaving my evenings and weekends mostly free, apart from that mystical just-before-deadline time. I can’t read on buses, it makes me instantly nauseous, and I’m fairly sure that if I tried it for more than thirty seconds there’d be vom everywhere.

Thing is, when you finish at 4 and then spend ninety minutes getting home, you aren’t in the mood to work any more. Those who live on campus or nearby (the famous Mill Road being a prime example and my eventual intended residence) can swing home, work like a bitch and still be eating dinner and watching Hollyoaks before I am.

Because this uni has a “non-traditional” student mix – lots of international and shitloads of mature students, most of whom obviously already have somewhere to live – their housing stock is even less sufficient than most. Renting in Cambridge is a joke so that leaves me traipsing back and forth every day. If it was to work, it wouldn’t bother me so much – walk out the door at the end of the day and relax, you are done. But when you have stacks of “homework” to do, the only reasonable alternative is to stay in the library until the late bus and just get it done.

Which isn’t a thrilling prospect.

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