Back in the day when I was a student, things were different. There were no student loans and if you were from a non-university town, your boarding allowance paid all the hostel fees. Bursary was the icing on the cake. Our class was infamous for its bad behaviour. We threw darts, and shouted abuse. I spoke to one of our long-suffering physics lecturers years later. He had walked out on the darts and jeering, but was clearly still shaken by the memory. I had no answer when he asked me why we did it. Clearly, we were bored and we didn’t value what had come so easy to us: a tertiary education.
If the lecture theatre was unruly, life in the hostels was anything but. On week nights, the curfew was 10pm. Saturday night was play night, and the curfew was midnight. This was rarely policed, until a rumour surfaced that devious and evil “things” were happening at night in our rooms. There was an inspection. Two of my friends with their respective boyfriends were woken by the warden standing over them. It’s difficult to say who was more traumatised. They were evicted from the hostel in disgrace. I, on the other hand, was fortunate enough to be absent altogether at a “friend’s” and was allowed to stay on.
So, how are these times related to pharmacy? One of my most enduring memories is of the lab we had in my third year of university. It was supposed to teach us about the effects of alcohol. We were given a beaker containing a large amount of 90 percent alcohol and told to sip it slowly over the next hour. We conducted the experiment in pairs, one drinking “placebo”, the other alcohol.
Being an impatient person, I downed mine in five minutes. The final sip is the last thing I remember. My subsequent actions became folklore and were often repeated back to me with accompanying roars of laughter. I made a beeline for the lab technician, who I had always thought was really hot. I sat on his knee and tried to undress him. That failing, I undressed myself. And when they brought me a cup of coffee, I threw it at them. Much of it landed on me. Then we had a lunch break. The boys in the class headed to the nearest pub, nicely confusing placebo with the real deal. Thankfully for me, most of them were then too pissed to remember anything more. I collapsed in a sobbing heap on the floor, demanding to see my boyfriend. He was less than impressed at being called out from his work to look after the incoherent mess I had become.
I heard that was the last time they did that experiment.