Post-Exams

Stupid hourlies have finally come to an end. Yay. As usual, this week of prolonged academic horror gave me more material for nerd-bashing. So here goes.

About two weeks before the hourlies, I came across this one nerd who was freaking out about one of our Finance courses. 'Hourlies are in two weeks!' she exclaimed, even before I had the chance to say hi or hello. 'Did you know that?'

'Yeah,' I said, acting like the cool person I am. So yeah.

'I have to go to a shadi tonight, and a birthday party tomorrow. I so have to start studying. Have you started studying?'

'Me? Abhi sae? No,' I shook my head, thinking of how to steer the conversation away from such nerdy issues. Nerd- talk gives me hives. No, seriously.

'Have you bought the book for the course?' she continued to pester me. Maybe that's one part of the cerebrum rote learning fails to develop - the ability to pick up hints.

'No, I'm going to do my notes,' I told her.

Her forehead creased with worry. 'Do you think we should get the book?'

'I'm not going to get it. Our teacher didn't say he would be giving stuff from it.'

'So you're not getting it?'

'NO.'

That finally shut her up. For ten minutes max.

As the week of the hourlies drew closer, it led to greater procrastination on my end and an increasing sense of trepidation on the part of the nerds. Hordes of them clustered around the printers in the library lab, which were spewing out reams and reams of slide printouts. If any non-nerd even dared to approach any one of the printers, a look of vile nerd venom was shot in his/ her direction. That would leave said non-nerd in a dazed state for the next half hour or so.

Don't you DARE approach this printer, or else.

The facebook statuses followed soon after. The annoying part wasn't simply the fact that they were nerdy. For some time, they were quite bearable. When a nerd puts up a status that says 'KSL is studying Corporate Law' (read: is rattofying all the handouts back to back until they can narrate them in their sleep), all I can do is roll my eyes and ignore it. It's when the nerds think that their creative juices have begun flowing and use them to concoct statuses that make me hurl. Needless to say, I did not take kindly to statuses that suggested that

a) Security Analysis was creating 'insecurity' amongst the student population

b) Ethics had forced them to resort to 'unethical' means,

or that....well, you get the drift.

It is amazing to see how people unite in the face of a national crisis, or rather a university-wide one. Nerds and non-nerds alike festoon the tables in the library where they pore over the aforementioned printouts. These pre-hourly sessions of cramming ultimately take the form of picture albums titled 'Semester Madness/ Mayhem'or something equally riduculous that would suggest madness in the form of a wild party with a pinata. The pictures, however, would display nerds in all their dark-circled glory hunched over a stack of notes. Any other pictures would be close-ups of pages in textbooks where they'd have drawn stick figures or circled some word with a double meaning. After the hourlies, a further examination of '10 new photos added' is bound to reveal close-ups of each paper with marks of at least 18 and above (out of 20').

Note: If a nerd only puts up five close-ups instead of six, he/she got bad marks in that paper for sure. Something like a 17.9.

The irony here is that the moment one's hourlies come to an end, people start putting up statuses like 'Finally! FREE! EEE!' No one could have guessed that this happiness is short-lived, and that in about fifteen hours we will have dragged ourselved back to university and will be slumbering over early morning lectures on brands and capitalization of assets.

Blegh.

Which is precisely why I never indulge in putting up an EEE!-ing status.