Self Examination

My mathematics colleague sent me this from one of the 173 exams he just marked, but let's call it a "short story".

Dear Examiners,

I can't finish your exam. I'm stuck on Question 3. How could that happen? I'm your best student. What went wrong?

Me. I went wrong. I'm a piece of shit.

I realised last night.

I wasn't studying, of course. Come on. Intro to Calculus? Easy. I'm already working through advanced textbooks. Only the dimwits studied for this exam.

I was bored. I'm always bored. These classes are boring. The other students are boring. I'm sorry, but you lecturers are boring, too. I'm going to be a great scientist who makes great discoveries. Why do I have to sit waiting through all these trivial courses and put up with all these yawning mediocrities? When do I get to hang out with the other geniuses and change the world?

I went for a walk through the science buildings. I don't know about you, but I get a wonderful feeling walking through the corridors of the science buildings at night.

There's a distinctive musty smell. To me that's the smell of science. For the rest of my life I will be walking corridors of science buildings, in universities all over the country and all over the world. I'll come in late at night to finish a calculation or a paper or a talk announcing my latest discovery, and wherever I do my PhD, and wherever I do postdoctoral research, and in whatever succession of places I'm a renowned professor, in all of them I'll walk down the corridors late at night and it will smell just like this.

In one of the corridors of labs there's a sign on the wall that says “Emergency Shower”. Next to it a chain hangs from the ceiling, about a third of the way down to the floor, and there's a plastic ring handle at the end. The idea is that if you've just poured chemicals all over yourself, or set yourself on fire, you can run out into the corridor and pull the chain and save yourself.

How often does that happen? Has anyone ever used that shower? I bet it doesn't even work. If you pulled the chain it would probably fall out of the ceiling, or spray you with rust.

There's no way these incompetent losers have a regular inspection and testing schedule.

I decided to demonstrate. It was about time someone with half a brain turned up and called out their shit.

I walked over to the chain.

I took hold of the chain.

I looked up and down the corridor. Of course there was no-one around.

I pulled the chain.

Guess what?

They do have a regular inspection and testing schedule.

I was drenched. So was the floor. A pool of water spread down the corridor in both directions.

There was also an alarm.

The alarm was loud and piercing and painful.

I clamped my hands to my ears and ran.

Further down the corridor I saw a light on in one of the labs. I hoped the alarm would be quieter inside, so I ran in.

Just at that moment the two people who had been in the lab rushed out through another door fifteen metres back down the corridor. They came out as I went in, and I might have said that it was good luck that they immediately turned in the direction away from me and didn't notice me, except that of course they turned in that direction because that way lay a massive pool of water seeping down the hall.

It was a bit quieter in the lab, then it was much quieter thirty seconds later, when the alarm was switched off. Soon after that one of the lab occupants returned to make an internal call to security. In that time I had hidden behind a piece of lab equipment, some big ugly grey thing, warm and menacingly throbbing. I made sure not to touch it.

I had no way of getting out of the lab. All I could hope was that the two occupants did not stay there all night.

They didn't. They only stayed another three hours.

After the excitement over the emergency shower died down – some security people came along to talk to them, and there were drains located periodically along the corridors so all of the water went away harmlessly (huh, it looks like whoever built this place actually thought it through pretty well!), and the shower could be properly inspected tomorrow to find out why it went off, and after all of the security people and the two lab guys had been running around for twenty minutes no-one noticed my wet footprints entering the far end of their lab – after all that, the two guys settled back into whatever experimental shit they were doing.

One guy was a PhD student and the other guy was an older postdoc. The postdoc was in charge, and did nothing but talk. The student barely said a word. He struggled with bits of equipment while the postdoc criticised him.

I sat there for three hours, cramped and tired and wet, and ultimately thankful that the grey throbbing hulk that hid me was also quite warm.

By the end of it that postdoc was driving me crazy.

He talked and talked and talked. About how great he was and all the great things he would do if he didn't have to spend so much time dealing with idiots and didn't have to work in such a third-rate dump of a research group and people didn't keep persecuting him because they were so envious of his talent. It was almost convincing in the beginning, but then you had to wonder: if this place was so terrible and he was so great, why was he here? If all of his enemies were so stupid, why hadn't he thwarted them? If he was so brilliant, then why, after listening to him drone on for three hours, did he sound like such a fucking idiot?

Much more than that, his pontifications did not match what was happening right here in the lab. He told the student, “Do X.”

X didn't work.

“You should have done Y. I told you to do Y.”

But he hadn't told him to do Y. He told him to do X.

The student did everything the postdoc asked him to do, and none of it worked, but every time the postdoc blamed the student.

The student had learned not to have any opinions, but eventually I guess he decided he really did not want to spend the entire night in that lab, so finally he made his own suggestion. “I think we should try Z.”

“That won't work. That's a stupid idea.”

“We've tried everything else.”

“Oh no, there's a lot more things we can try.”

“I'm going to try it anyway.”

“It won't work.” He delivered a long, complex and utterly convincing explanation of why Z would not work.

It did work.

“That's what I told you to do right from the beginning, two hours ago, and you didn't do it.”

“Can we go home now?”

They started to pack up, but the postdoc kept talking. “bla bla bla ... This whole project would be finished by now if only people did what I said. The whole problem is... bla bla bla.” He was still complaining when they turned the lights off and left.

I had realised over an hour earlier: that postdoc was me. He said exactly the things I said. He thought exactly the things I thought. I had never had the chance before to sit, wet and uncomfortable and tired and with an exam the next day, and listen to myself being a dickhead for hours on end.

It was edifying.

I unfolded myself from behind Warm Throb and hobbled stiffly out of the lab and out of the building and back to my room. And decided that from today I would be better.

Except of course that didn't change the fact that I didn't study for this exam, or get much sleep, and I have no idea how to do Question 3, and...

Oh, just a minute. I see how to do it now. Seeya!

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Thanks for reading. Apologies that this was the first post of the year — things have been a little more hectic than expected.

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And if you thought this story was too long for some dweeb to write down during an exam: have you ever read a Joseph Conrad novel? In half of those books the writer claims that the entire novel was narrated to them over an evening in a bar. I just looked up an audio book of “Lord Jim”. It’s fifteen hours long. That’s how long it takes to tell that story to someone. That book is a classic. People study it at universities, or at least they used to. So don’t tell me about plausible narrative duration!