Some Idiots, Little Giant, Ham Sandwich

Exhibit A: I am in the escape pods again. Some idiot nearby is wearing his sunglasses and listening to his iPod at a volume that makes the rest of us suffer, even though he's wearing headphones. I swear to god, if he's wearing obnoxious cologne, he'll have hit the motherfucking trifecta of annoyingness.

Exhibit B: I'm killing a bit of time before I have to go to lecture/lab. The professor is out of town today, at a conference, so that means that the lab TA (the one who I have, through sheer self-restraint, not shot dead like a dog in the road) is going to be teaching both the lecture and lab. I so dislike that plan that I've been arguing with The Brain all morning about whether or not we should even go to class today. It would be a mistake not to go, I know, because we're covering three or four hundred million years worth of plants--the seedless vascular plants, if you must know--in a single mega-lecture, and I think I might miss a point or two if I rely solely on the book. But the idea of three hours at the hands of this TA makes me want to pull the fire alarm on the way into the building so that class might be canceled.

I'm so fighting the urge to outline, in great and specific detail, the extent of his idiocy.

I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do it.

Exhibit C: Here's a surprise: Today's featured idiot isn't the sunglasses-wearing, music-blaring computer pod idiot, nor is it my as-of-yet-unmurdered, lazy-ass lab TA. No, today's featured idiot is actually the person who decided that the science and engineering library needed no more than a single goddamned copier/printer. There was a goddamn line today, ten deep, at the lone copier/printer, and when I, in hopes of bypassing the line, asked the work-study student who was manning the circulation desk (read: updating her Facebook account) if there was another copier in the library, she looked at me with big, moony eyes and drawled out a nasal, "Nya-oooo." I thanked her, stood in line,  made my copies. Then I went looked it up: There are seven copiers on a campus that serves nearly thirty-thousand students. The biggest library got three of them. The other four are spread across three other libraries.

I can, off the top of my head, recall five copiers in that library alone, back in the days when I was a young undergraduate. Ah, progress.

Anyway, here is a detail from the study room where I spent three hours this morning.


And here is what I had for lunch.