CASUALTY'S BLOG

Casualty

A Blog For Rat...
Tuesday, March 8, 2005

who apparently has too much spare time! Just kidding! This one's for you.

I had a random firefly moment in my lecture today, when I thought my lecturer was talking about Firefly. He was just about to make the list of coolest lecturers ever when I realised he was talking about a book from years ago. Had many similarities though. My friend next to me thought I'd lost the plot as I sat there with a stupidly massive grin on my face! Still the guy knows his science fiction for a sociology professor.

The Kent bit of England has finally got rid of the snow! I fell over too many times for it to be magical but I kind of miss it, now it's just rainy! Yuck! Any way here's my random story of the week...

I drove back to University last monday from home only to be held up in traffic because all the roads in Kent had been covered in snow overnight! I make it back to Canterbury with an hour before my lecture and I can't find a parking space anywhere near my house. I finally leave my car all the way up the road. I get in, manage to convince my housemate that he really does want to help me unload my computer from my car beacuse I'll probably slip on the snow and it's too heavy for me to carry anyway. We have a little chat about snowmen and gas bills and how our fire alarm is acting funny and keeps going off when...

...beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep... the damn thing starts to go off! So there we are pushing, pokeing, prodding,
fanning and bashing this thing to get it to stop makeing that awful noise, the kind that gets right in your head. We even disconnect it from the mains and it's still going off. Anyway this comedy act goes on for about 10 minutes before my housmate finally declares it's officially broken and goes off to ring our handiman. I'm there stuffing the thing in a kitchen drawer and packing tea towels round it so he can actually hear what's being said on the phone.

He puts the phone down and says we need to take out the battery. I tell him there isn't a battery because we have looked everywhere and it isn't a big piece of equiptment. We finally find it hidden in the side, rip it out and sink to the floor with relief. He then turns to me and says "How come the computer is turned off?... How come the lights don't work?" "We must have tripped the switch in all the commotion," say I. So the two of us head off to search for a box mounted on the wall, we finally find a contender
outside in a little cupboard, but all the switches say 'ON' so we decide that can't be it. I give up at this point as I am running out of time. We both unload my car, dump it all in my room, I get changed in to my uniform for work, thank my housemate for his help and head off to Campus and my lecture.

On the way I meet my friend who gets all excited and exclaims "have you heard about the power cut? It's all over Canterbury!." I loose the will to live then as I finally figure out what had happened. All student fire alarms have to be plugged in to the mains electricity by law so students can't take the batteries out and then sue if a fire occurs. They also have to have batteries fitted in case of power cuts like the one on Moday. Whena battery dies they are programmed to alarm continuously until it is changed. Our battery was dead only we didn't know until the power cut and we were so busy dealing with the alarm that we didn't notice that there was one. It was just a coincidence we were talking about the alarm when it started going off. The box we found was the right one but we hadn't tripped any switches so of course they all said 'ON'. I ring my housemate to let him know it's a power cut which he has figured out by this time anyway and make it to my lecture with 1 minute to spare.

Anyway, that was half a day in the life of me! Hope it was vaguely amuseing! Be safe.

Alison

COMMENTS

Tuesday, March 8, 2005 4:10 PM

RAT


I don't think anyones ever blogd just for me, shiny!!


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