Taters - hope you didn’t get blown away in the windstorm! In my offical capacity as Wicked Witch, I managed to avoid any low-flying houses landing on my head…
Jahdra, people often say things that upset others, without meaning to, and it’s usually because they didn’t phrase it how they really meant it to come out. Ophie and I will be sending positive thoughts your way though, and hope you feel better about things today.
SCL - you’re exactly the kind of person your friend needs, I’m sure you’ll be karmically rewarded for it!
Thanks for the link, swampy, it reminds me of a formation drill team we saw at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of years ago. Formation marching with power tools. You people are strange.
In other news, yesterday I made a student cry. In fact it turned out to be an Oscar-merited performance, and such a shame she wasn’t a drama student 'cos she’s got wasted talents there!
I was doing hall duty for one of the degree ceremonies and this particular student, mature student too (late 20s, early 30s), gave me her seat allocation ticket and then told us she was going to sit with her best friend. I politely told her she was welcome to sit with her friend until the ceremony was due to start and then she would need to take her allocated seat. She said she was going to sit with her friend, I said that wouldn’t be possible. She flounced off to complain to her mother.
Her mother comes over and says that her daughter wants to sit with the friend, we explain for the second time exactly why that’s not possible. The congregations team spends months preparing the lists and issuing tickets - students are seated in the order in which they go up on stage to shake hands with the Chancellor. It’s not difficult to understand, is it? We have around 250-300 students per ceremony and if they all wanted to sit wherever they fancied, we’d be in utter chaos.
Anyway, mother wasn’t happy, daughter was turning on the tears. So we sent for the congregations supervisor…mother harangued him for a while, daughter grizzled. He sided with us and explained why daughter had to sit in the seat she was allocated, adding that we have very little time to get them out of their seats, lined up in the side aisle and do a last check of names to make sure they’re in the right order before sending them to the stage.
Mother is almost at screaming point by now. Daughter throws her ceremony booket on the floor, stamps on it, hurls her cap and gown at the superviser and runs out of the hall screeching about how we’re horrible unhelpful people and her entire day’s been ruined.
We watch, amused and bemused. Such is life. She didn’t come back, and her degree was awarded in absentia.
I’m so glad that was the only duty I had to do! Today’s going to be nice and peaceful, I’m faffing about with ethnicity returns. Oh joy.