Over the holidays, most people either went home for the winter, or gathered in their lounges coming up with urban myths about how cold and disgusting Dunedin is.
Hot air about cold weather is as much a part the Otago Student Experience™ as wearing your old school uniform to costume parties and having flings with people you won’t have to deal with next year. As always, the rule is the colder you make it sound, the tougher you look.
The absence of students over the break left the Proctor free to work on his annual report, which has been occupying much of his time recently. He didn’t even have any complaints about the closure of the sad, dreary, grubby Gardies, except for one young jerk who tried to steal the sign (“he got about half a block before we caught him.”) Mayor Peter Chin’s much-lamented liquor ban was, the Proctor explained, merely a contingency plan in case things got nasty, since it would have made it easier to clear the area.
The Proctor has also just installed a third (!) arms locker in his office. He’s been trying to get this idea of a centralised, secure, public-service gun safe on campus off the ground for a while, and now that it’s working the demand for the service has required its immediate expansion. The Proctor now has a speargun, a crossbow, and about thirty other heaters of various descriptions locked away where nefarious, over-exuberant, and stupid people can’t get them, and encourages anyone else who has a gun to pass it to him for safekeeping between hunting trips.
Although nobody was stupid over the break, there was one cutely silly incident involving a young lady who’s concurrently enrolled here and at a university in Scotland that insisted she sit an exam at exactly the same time as it was being run over there. Prolonged negotiation failed to dissuade them from this, which meant the poor girl had to sit an exam in the Campus Watch office, between 1.30 and 4.30 in the morning. Now that’s something to yarn about.
Proctology - 16
