A Schoolboy Error

I cannot believe that I made this classic mistake this morning, I was all set to go for my dissertation meeting at 11:00, and arrived slightly early for the meeting. When I arrived, there were a group of students standing outside the door as if they were waiting to be seen and my tutor was in her office talking to someone. I thought that they might just be waiting for their friend who was just finishing his meeting but after a couple of minutes, when he was done, another student went in to be seen. At this point I felt really stupid, had I got the right day? I had got it into my mind that my meeting was at 11:00 as it had been on the previous two occasions. What I failed to check was whether it was any different this week - which it was, 11:30. I had made an effort to get out of bed and walk down to university and I was half an hour early. Nevermind I thought I've got a few errands to run so I can do those beforehand rather than afterwards as I'd planned.

My first port of call was the modern languages department. I forgot to collect my results from my self funding spanish lessons last year and have been waiting this long to get a certificate and my results. One excuse has followed another and the last I heard I was waiting on a signature from the head of department who was away from the office (either on leave of through illness) and no one really knew when she would be back. After chasing it up, the secretary informed me that she might be able to find someone else to sign the certificate so I left it at that and have been waiting to collect it since the beginning of the week. It turns out that the office opening hours have been substantially reduced this year and now the office is only open Wednesday to Friday 1pm 'til 4pm. So no luck there then I would have to come back tomorrow when knowing my luck she will be ill for the day and this whole saga will drag on until late next week. I still don't even know if I passed (although if I have a certificate I would assume that I did, maybe I should check before they go to a lot of trouble to get a certificate of failure signed!

The next task on my list was to hand in my assignment. I proceeded to fill in the two cover sheets as usual and tried to hand it in only to be told that the barcode system that they failed to introduce several weeks ago was now working and I was required to print one of these sheets off before I could hand it in. I wouldn't have minded so much but as soon as we received the email a few weeks ago I tried to log onto the system to print these barcodes off in advance only to find that the system wasn't working quite yet. No further email informing us that the service was now up and running have been received so I naturally assumed that it was still being investigated. So I trundled off to the lab to try and find a computer to print from and thankfully most of the computers were free. I had to trawl through my emails to find the link to the barcode website (made far easier now that we are hosted by Google) and finally managed to hand it in.

Thinking that I should be heading back for my meeting now, I checked my watch... 11:15. All that and I'd only managed to kill 15 minutes, what can I do now? I managed to waste away the rest of the time by trundling down into town; I didn't quite make it all the way but the walk was pleasant nonetheless. Meeting all went well and the conclusion was that I should start putting pen to paper (metaphorically of course, no one uses a pen these days).

I was quite looking forward to watching the next episode of Defying Gravity tonight but sadly the internet is playing up so the ~1GB file (I went for the HD option) is currently estimated as taking nearly five hours to download. The rest of the net seems fairly slow as well so I'm sure it's not just the iPlayer. This is the first glitch I've seen from O2 so I'm hoping all will be fixed tomorrow otherwise words will be had I fear. That put a downer on the rest of the evening seeing as I get 90% of my entertainment from the internet and 50% of that from the iPlayer so bandwidth is quite important for that. I had one programme saved up so that got watched and a lot of party rings got eaten out of frustration.

I haven't quite decided what to do about tomorrow yet and I'm in somewhat of a dilemma because the usual lab class has been cancelled meaning effectively I have the day off (or to spend working at home). The options stand at walking in to try and get my Spanish certificate and getting out of the house for a bit or sitting at home and trying to get some work done. One part of me thinks that sitting in front of the computer all day can't be good and that I should go out and get some exercise but the other half thinks that if I do walk into town then I won't want to do any work when I get back and it will just act as a distraction between checking emails and twitter. I do need to get bread and milk so does the 5 minute walk into Crookes count? It isn't exactly strenuous exercise and I'm not sure it would get the heart rate going that much. Hrm... I guess I will just have to see what I feel like tomorrow. If the internet is still on a go slow then I will probably be more motivated to go into town rather than getting distracted with TV shows.