Angry Geek thinks you shouldn't suffer

In my Monday morning lectures there’s a ten-minute break in the three hours of unending pain, and during this time one of the students likes to go and get a coffee. Without fail, he comes back ten minutes late each week. As I am more anal than a particularly uptight haemorrhoid this irritates me greatly, and so next week I will attempt to fashion a landmine out of a bottle of water, a multivitamin tablet, and some thumbtacks.

Anyway, this itself isn’t the point, the point is that this chap also likes to pretend he’s one of the financial establishment’s elite young minds. He reads the financial times and pretends he understands it, rather than admitting he just likes doodling stickmen on the little graphs and charts, and he talks to his friends about ‘the problem with the economy’ as if he’s discussing something he has an iota of experience of. He’s basically like everyone else in the financial sector, it’s just he’s within spitting distance of me and that makes him stand out more.

I only mention him because this week it’s Imperial’s favourite seven days of pretending to be something we’re not – no, not environmentally sound, the other one. It’s ArtsFest! Ooh. Just saying it makes me feel like I’m in an energy drink advert circa 1985. Me and Gilead Amit are in shell suits with wacky hair and there’s some cheap hand-drawn special effects in the background. I look slightly more effeminate than he does, but no-one’s really asking. We rock out for twenty seconds and then shout something about the Sherfield building. Cut.

Everyone likes to show off what extra skills they have – why else would we write CVs – but ArtsFest just seems that one step too far, when Imperial conspires to show everyone that we’re just as good as the other kids. Look, you say, we’ve got at least thirteen different kinds of saxophone societies. Who needs arts degrees. We’ve got all the arts we need right here, you say, and then you grab your crotch a bit. Insecure? Us? Would a university who was insecure have three separate societies dedicated to interpretive dance? I think not! I jest, of course. We actually have four. And I really love the arts and music stuff we’ve got at Imperial; the IC Big Band is my first good memory of Imperial (I recorded their performance in my Fresher’s week like some nineties bootlegger), and there’s a lot of good science going on at Imperial that relates to art in some way or another. I’ve been talking to one academic in particular lately – who challenged me about writing this column which I completely denied at the time, apologies if you know who you are – who’s got some great work going on in that area. And that’s fab. Honestly. I’d even go as far as to use the ancient slang word ‘fab’. I just did, in fact.

But Imperial is full of people who really wish they weren’t here, and it’s a little bit sad. In most cases, really sad – most of the Felix staff should be out there right now replacing the biro-stuffed-up-a-pig’s-arse journalists that are currently working day and night to make all forms of news completely unreadable. Unfortunately, most of them are going to end up stuck in dead-end science and engineering jobs, pretending to give a shit about tensile stress and high energy states. So I see ArtsFest as more of a distress call than anything else. Maybe that’s more important than, you know, a steady job?

What do I know, though, eh? I can’t even manage a weekly column at the moment.