_Noise_Conspiracy.jpg "The (International) Noise Conspiracy - 002-09-17: 9:30 Club, Washington D.C., USA")
Nutter of the week
May 4th, 2006 at 23:32
I had an exam today, for the first time in nearly a year. Unusually, it was a “seen” exam, which meant I had 24 hours beforehand to spend on Wikipedia revising, so that what I would end up writing would be super-excellent. Instead of doing this, I spent the time refreshing my Google Adsense account to see what sort of silly-money I was making.
I was quite worried about the exam for one reason, and one reason alone. I hadn’t used a pen since that last business studies exam eleven months ago- would I remember how to hold it? Could I remember how to write? I had to fill in a form when I bought my laptop on Monday (for a Staples loyalty card)- it provided little boxes in which I could write each individual letter in my name, and even then my scrawl was practically indecipherable. And now I had to write an entire essay by hand.
As it turned out, I couldn’t actually read back what I’d written, and my handwriting seems to have turned into what looks like Hebrew, or one of those alphabets where each character is connected to a line.
As I’m now an invigilator, I was sort of hoping for an “is there a doctor on the plane?” moment. I wanted one of the people at the front of the room to cry, “Oh no! Our star invigilator is down! We might have to cancel the exam… unless… Is there an invigilator in the room?!”, at which point I’d leap up and answer the call of duty. Unfortunately the closest this came to happening was when I deliberately tried to trip one of the real invigilators up as they walked past me.
After the exam, myself, Mike and Rob, who you may remember from previous blog updates, went to Polar Bear for a few games of Pool. After I’d thrashed Mike a couple of times, and he’s got hilariously angry about it, I encountered my latest Nutter Of The Week.
Polar Bear, as you might have guessed by its hip name is a very studenty pub. In fact, it’s just across the road from my university. It has loud music, a quiz machine, pool, big TVs, a video jukebox, sofas, and very studenty branding. Everyone in there is under-25. Or so I thought.
A man who looked like he was in his 50s, who was wearing a fairly smart, light blue shirt approached us, pint of beer in hand, and introduced himself. “Hello, my name is John”, he said, shaking our hands. “Could I play pool with you?”, he quivered. He looked like a slightly creepier version of Michael Palin, with less hair.
There wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to play pool with this guy- here was a man who was blantantly too old to be in a pub of this nature, as it just looks wrong. When I told my mum this story, she suggested that he might have been a paedophile.
Rob, Mike and myself looked at each other nervously, as if to say with our eyes, “how can we get this strange old man to go away?”. My eyes darted from Mike, to Rob, to John, whilst making “Umm…” and “Erm….” sounds, hoping that stalling would allow him to take the hint, rather than prolongue the agony. “I just want to play… because I love the game”, he said, pitifully. He looked like he wanted to cry.
After a lifetime of half sentences, such as “We were just about to…”, “I’m going to…”, “You’re a bit…”, he finally took the hint and sighed, and looked genuinely disappointed and saddened by our declination by proxy.
This didn’t deter him though- he approached the other two groups of people around the other two pool tables. The first seemed to handle it better than us, and got rid of him within seconds, and the second seemed to be having either an encounter as awkward as ours, or were having a chat with him. Either way, they didn’t end up playing pool with him.
On his way out, defeated, he walked past us again, asking for one final time, “So you don’t want to play pool with me, then?”. He’d turned away and started walking before we’d even opened our mouths.
Poor John.
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