He Abides

[faustus]

I got called a dude on Saturday night, or, rather, Sunday morning. It's an occupational hazard that I'm going to run into students when I'm in town; it's a small place and I suppose they have as much right to be here as I have. As long as they let me get on with my stuff, and don't expect a bonus tutorial. In High Wycombe a couple of them worked in Tescos and I'd always end up at their till with a basket full of Reduced to Clear items. Ooops. Faintly embarrassing. There were some who used to hassle me for marks at the bus stop, but they got short shrift, and eventually learnt that they could at least ask how I was first.

A couple of months ago in the Bell and Crown, a first year student asked me whether her friend should apply for the job of head of department. This was hardly sensitive, given that at the time our head of department was terminally ill, although still very much alive and considered to be still in the post. We hadn't even begun to talk about replacing him, and we still haven't, some weeks after the funeral. But most of the time they're content to let you get on with your stuff, although perhaps E was right to say he wonders about the wisdom of being seen inebriated in public by them. I'm not convinced I have any authority to lose, and, after all, they're all supposed to be adults. I'm trying not to let it cramp what little style I have.

One problem is that there are a lot more of them than there are of me, and I certainly don't recognise half their faces. Unless they are looking bored, in a row with others looking bored, of course. So someone or other said hi to me outside the Bell and a couple of weeks ago, and I've no idea who it was, but I made nice back. I almost always see someone I know at the Orange Street Music Club, but they tend to be the smarter kids, and are fun enough to hang around with. Some of them are friends of friends, anyway.

The weird thing is when, as happened on Sunday, they feel the need to yell out "That's my lecturer!". It's not so much the implication of ownership, as the strangeness of them wanting other people to know. Why tell the world? So it was on Sunday - "That's dude's my lecturer!".

NW was amused. "They called you a dude, man," he said. "You're a dude."

Maybe I have to consider the possibility that I'm popular with them. H'mm.

Meanwhile today we had a powercut.

I'd been wrestling with a document all morning that ought to have been an easy job, but I'd done it once already last week and stupidly saved it in the same place I'd got it from, rather than to a sensible directory - having clicked it open as an email attachment in the first place - and whilst I found the reworked file eventually, for once a temporary file was just that and it seemed to take longer than anticipated to edit it a second time. I'd got as far as saving it to a PDF in order to ensure that my beautifully formatted document maintains its pagination when it gets printed at work, when the screen goes black. The music stops.

I've got an old-fashioned fuse box and so there's no trip switches to go at the faintest shudder of a charge, so I can't reset if it's just me - and I reckon it's street wide as well. An alarm went off somewhere at that precise moment of the cut. The shop on the corner is in darkness.

Suddenly I feel lost. It's not quite lunch time, but what do I have to eat that doesn't need heating? I can't have a crisp sandwich again, surely? And my plan to watch a DVD is off, as is the plan to listen to the radio instead, and I can't go to work as the file I need to deal with is still in the process of being saved. I read a bit of the review section of The Guardian from... oh, July sometime. I've got behind again.

After a good hour it comes on again, and I reset the answerphone. I power up the computer again, and deal with all the files it's rescued which appear to older versions than those I've actually got saved. Fortunately the file I've been working on is intact, and I turn it into a PDF, only three hours behind schedule. All I have to do now is sort out getting it printed.