Thursday, 16 January 2014

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Boy, do I have something fun to tell you guys about today. My Physics Practical.

My. Physics. Practical.

Was an utter and unqualified disaster.

Let me repeat that one more time- my physics practical was a disaster. Say what? What just happened? How did this happen? Don't worry friends, I shall tell you.

At the beginning, let me just say that I am GOBSMACKED at the way things turned out, merely because 'gobsmacked' is a fun word. It's right up there on my list of things that are nice to say, next to 'winsome' and 'deoxyribonucleic acid'. I like using big science words in normal conversation to make myself sound smarter. Most of the time, they are absolutely irrelevant to what I'm talking about, but nobody ever calls me out on it, which is a lot of fun. It reminds me of this game we play in school. You ask somebody, in a really confident tone, "Hey, you know how they have glow-in-the-dark money in Norway, right?" One person in a hundred will say "what are you talking about, that's preposterous." The rest are just going to be like "Yeah, so?"

Anyway, back to my physics practical. As you might have gathered by now, I did badly. And let me tell you, it is very, very hard to do badly in a physics prac. They're not as easy as computer practicals which I once finished in fifteen minutes and scored full marks, but definitely way easier than Chem pracs, which were actually a really scary thing a while ago. The last physics practical I did, I got twenty seven out of thirty.

So how did I screw up so badly? I did the first part okay, and then the "visiting examiner", a.k.a my physics teacher, who likes to reap the souls of Humanities students and hangs out with Dracula in his spare time, didn't allow me to do three marks worth of experiment because my screw gauge value was off by 0.03 mm. Guess how big an error that would have been in my calculations. Wrong, it would have given me 0.0009 deviation from the value.

So that shook me up pretty badly, and he also made me wait half an hour before starting the next question. Why? BECAUSE HE CAN. And when I started the optics question, I broke a lens.

I broke the freaking convex lens.

It slipped out of my shaking hands and I watched in slow motion as it fell to the floor and separated into a thousand glittering fragments that spun around my feet, so that a second later I was standing on a bed of sparkling diamond-shaped pieces of failed physics practical, generously dusted over with shame. A thousand horrified gazes levelled at my shoes, and from the corner of the lab, I can hear my teacher's voice going "She broke the lens. She broke the lens.All my thirteen years of teaching, no one ever broke the lens. She broke it."

So, yeah, today was not a good day. SIGH. Computer pracs are tomorrow, and, the way my week is going, I expect that'll suck too. Also, I cut my own fringe at three o'clock in the morning yesterday. You can guess how that turned out, go on, have some fun with that. I hope you are having a better day than I am. Keep on keeping on!



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