Sunday of my Life

Thank you! That is offically my bad pun for the day.

Let me tell you what happened to me on Wednesday.
Note for the unwary: Names of people and institutions/companies/dogs have been changed so that I cannot be sued for defamation. Thankyou.

OK…so I, as part of the current course I’m doing, have to take a class on Hardware Fundamentals.

Now, for a computer nerd who’s being taking computers apart for as long as he could operate a screwdriver, this class is a riveting experience, filled with information that is all totally new to me and is not boring in the least.

Sorry, I guess I really am a compulsive liar.

Now, thankfully, I have managed to make a number of friends in this class, something which, and this is me actually being truthful, I doubted I’d do this quickly. One of them had an accident that could have been potentially fatal the other day. Brett we’ll call him. We were in hardware, and another student was putting a computer together (a requirement for some reason, God only knows why as none of the hardware in the room actually works properly, as you’ll see in a minute) and was having some troubles with it. He called Brett over to see if he could see what was wrong with it.

Brett hit the power button so he could see which point in the boot sequence it got up to, and got the shock of his life as power arced out of the case and into his hand. That hand has clamped down onto the case and, with the locking of muscles which commonly occurs in an electrical shock, his other hand has come down to join it, providing the power with a course out of his body.

So, at this point, Brett has a full power (240 volt, 10 amp) charge going right across his heart. Not the most survivable of situations. Brett is lurching around attempting to put this case down. The things he said don’t bear repeating.

Ah, what the hell, I’ll say them anyway. I believe they went along the lines of ‘fuckshitcrapshitfuckfuckfuckhelpfuckcrapshitfuckinghellcrapshitfuck’.

Now, some of you may be thinking ‘My, that young man has a foul mouth on him’, but what do you expect? Someone’s getting electrocuted and they say ‘Oh dear. That tingles.’

So, after about 20 seconds Brett manages to throw the computer down. The strength with which his hands were gripping the case means that he has sliced his hands in several places when he threw the case down.

This is regrettable, but we consider it a good move in the long run.

We manage to get Brett sitting (not as easy as it sounds as his muscles don’t want to obey him at this point), and ask our teacher, we’ll call him…uh…Fuckrag…anyway, we ask Fuckrag if we could have some bandage or something to stem the flow of blood from Brett’s hands.

Now, you’d think a teacher, who’s primary responsiblity is his students, would be more than willing to allow this student to leave to go get his hands bandaged/stitched/amputated. No such luck. Upon Brett throwing down the computer, Fuckrag has gone over to it and started examing it (shame it wasn’t plugged in anymore). He’s more concerned with seeing if the computer’s OK than if his student is OK! I mean, hello, obviously the computer isn’t OK, if it was, it wouldn’t have just electrocuted one your students!

Wanker

So, after a while, Fuckrag has allowed one of us to go get some bandaids for Brett. Fuckrag starts joking around, trying to make it seem like this situation wasn’t at all life-threatening. Eventually, a group of us have had enough of this, and we take Brett off to go fill out first-aid and occupational health and safety forms, and to go register a complaint against Fuckrag.

The man is a teacher for fucks sake. He’s supposed to be primarily concerned with our wellbeing, and he is more concerned about the wellbeing of a piece of faulty hardware. I dearly hope this man doesn’t have an children, becuase if this is compassion he manages to show ordinary people, I doubt children are safe around him.

So the school had an electrician out the next day to check the surge protectors and safety switches on the room. Thye turn out to be faulty (is it just me, or is that another ‘well, duh!’ situation?). Fuckrag wasn’t any too happy with the group of us when we had class with him next. Gee, I wonder why. But, suddenly, now he’s all concerned about how Brett is. Idiot, does he think we don’t notice how false his concern is? The only person he’s really concerned about is himself, becuase now he’s in deep donkey excrement becuase of his lack of action.

To wrap this up, a message: if you’re a teacher, remember who you’re primary concerns are supposed to be. If you aren’t..uhh…party on dude!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2004 at 8:20 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.