Friday the 13th
May 14th, 2005 at 12:13am
Some say it is unlucky, but for me it just turned me into an idiot magnet…
Firstly, seeing as it was just after midnight when I was fiddling with Windows & CUPS, I can say that the first idiots I ran into were Microsoft, the lovely people who have a default setting in their CUPS server which wants Internet Explorer authentication. Considering that the whole point of CUPS is OS independent printer support, and that the ONLY OS which has Internet Explorer nowadays is Windows, this has to be one of the most ridiculous setting I have seen yet.
Next Idiots, ACTION (Yea, I know, I’m beating the ACTION Rant drum again), not the drivers, just the administrators. I was at my bus stop at 8:30, a whole 5 minutes before my bus was due, but did it turn up? Of course not…but I stayed at that bus stop anyway because a teacher lives nearby and drives past there in the morning, and would be happy to give me a lift…unfortunately she had already gone, but I didn’t know that, so I waited for her or the next “38” bus. The 38 is due before the 36, so there was no point walking down the street to the other bus stop where I could catch a 36 or a 38, because that would eliminate the “get a lift” possibility…but lo and behold, the 36 came nearly 10 minutes early, and I was left to watch it go around the corner. Eventually the next 38 came…but it was too late to get to Dickson College at 8:50 to do what I wanted to do, and I was late for my 9am class.
My day at Dickson College was filled with people stepping out in front of me, cutting me off, and in general, blocking my walking path…thanks, I really needed that
Idiot number three, Dinal (Yes Dinal, it is you!). I am hoping that, other than Microsoft employees, there aren’t more people like Dinal who think that Internet Explorer is better than Firefox…what kind of idiot thinks that a major-security-risk-integrated
I had a bit of a break from idiots, I spent two hours in the library (good thing I was working, that way I didn’t have to attend an assembly filled with idiots playing loud “music” and apparently “dancing”), then I had a class, and went into Civic to await a friend’s arrival. This waiting period proved interesting:
To start with, more people blocking my walking path for no good reason…it just so happens that I walk faster than most people, and stepping out in front of me is very annoying, but it doesn’t stop most people from doing it anyway.
I went to sit down on a seat to wait for the person’s arrival, but just before I could sit down, somebody jumped in the way and sat down instead, so I sat on a different seat. Incidentally, this “somebody” was only seated for 30 seconds…hardly seems worth the bother does it?
While I was sitting down, two people walked past and nearly sat on me….the day keeps getting better doesn’t it?
The person I was waiting for arrived on time, and I got on the bus with them, naturally, somebody had taken my favourite seat 20 seconds before me, so I sat down elsewhere and moved onto my favourite seat when it was vacated.
On the way back was no better, firstly I was treated as a bag rest by someone…they just plonked their bag right on top of me!! At an interchange, an old woman got on with a trolley overflowing with plastic bags…the bus was already crowded without that…and it seemed quite awkward for her to manoeuvre it…her trying to get off the bus with it was worse though. The other amazingly dumb idiot was just nuts. They had headphones, but they were wearing them around their neck, not on their ears, the headphones were also blaring…making it impossible to hear the driver’s radio, which is a pity because I missed some good bits, I think the driver had difficulty hearing the radio over these headphones at time as well.
After getting off the bus, I sat down and got out my thermos, poured my coffee into my linux.conf.au mug, and had my coffee. This was, however, interrupted by another idiot, this one happened to be from my college, and they recognised me, so they came over and started asking me strange questions. “How old are you?” “What year are you in?” “What year were you in during 1990?” etc…this lasted about two minutes, after which they just walked off. Why did I put up with this? Quite simply because I know that they are less mentally capable than most, and have a habit of doing this.
That was Friday the 13th.
Samuel
Entry Filed under: Canberra Stories,Lunacy/Idiots,Samuel's Editorials
