I found myself with the rest of the class Thursday morning on the grounds of a university in the centre of Toulouse.
What was the reason of our presence? Apparently we were going to be given a tour where two IT technicians would tell us about how they installed the servers and did all the cabling so that we could have Internet access in all the rooms. Boring…..
In other words, a whole morning wasted. I think I would have been much more productive if I had stayed at home, either sleeping until 10am or working on some of my art projects.
We walked around the school as we listened to the droning of the technicians. I could tell that they were extremely proud of themselves with all the work involved…The only problem was that I couldn’t tell what they were saying.
I was constantly stuck at the back of the group, trying to see around the ocean of heads that swayed back and forth in front of me. I could easily imagine what the technicians would see from their side: a small crop of orange hair moving from side to side in the back….
I quickly complained to one of my classmates who suggested that I tried to go to the front.
I stared at the crowd and took a deep breath.
Trying to forget for one moment my mild agoraphobia, I finally managed to get to the front, only to find that we had started to head in the opposite direction.
Aaaagh!!....
...
So, back to square one.
After some time, we ended up in a room full of cables. I had managed to get close enough to hear what the men were saying but I still couldn’t see what everyone was looking at.
"And the red cables go into this machine that stores everybody’s files..."
"Whilst the brown cables are linked to these computers over here."
At last, there was something that I found mildly interesting! I forced my way a bit and caught a quick glimpse of these "cables" only to be disappointed by my colour-blindness.
Brown and red? Which one was which? Heck, I could hardly see the difference between the purple and blue ones...
My deception didn’t last long because my attention was then quickly drawn to my foot as a girl trod on it with a stiletto shoe who then ordered me to look where I was walking.
Look where I was going? I wasn’t even walking.
Because of that incident, I was walking with a slight distance between me and my colleagues.
After a while, I was able to walk normally and decided to catch up with the others by running, only to receive an opening door in the face.
One of my friends simply stared at me and remarked that I was the only one to get caught by such incidents as he handed me a tissue to mop up my bleeding nose.
Anther said that ever so famous phrase “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”.
I simply stared at him and replied that I felt like the whole world had recently decided to ty to kill me (and it was doing a rather good job of it too)...
I then spent the afternoon English lesson sleeping, claiming that I was "recovering".
Sometimes, I wonder why I get up these days...