I was in a lecture on fluid dynamics in my final year of university. There was a LOT to cover. The lecturer was writing it all on the whiteboard, and we were scribbling it all down.

As you’d expect in any engineering lecture, Greek symbols were used a lot, including one new one. It was a vertical squiggly line, and it cropped up a LOT in the lecture.

It was only just toward the end of two hours of note-taking that the lecturer made some comment that made the entire class groan.

There were TWO very similar-looking Greek letters he had been using throughout the lecture, but everyone thought it was the same vertical squiggle!

Ugh.

I went to university to do a degree in Computer Science before IT was considered a separate thing. All my good professors and lecturers dressed like they were ready to crawl around behind, under, and over the mainframes. All the bad ones wore stereotypical “professor” clothing.

In one lecture (with one of the good ones), there was a hardware fault somewhere in the internal network, and it was proving impossible to fix. The day’s topic got thrown out of the window — literally: he tore down the flip-pad sheet, screwed it into a ball, and tossed it through a convenient open window — and we all got down to troubleshooting.

Troubleshooting included crawling through the false ceiling crawlways, lifting the floor tiles reaching underneath, etc. It was fun — apart from the literal rat’s nest found in the “rat’s nest” of cables behind one of the mainframes.

It turned out to be the old cleaner-unplugs-something-important-to-plug-in-a-vacuum-cleaner moment, and nobody had spotted it; a good lesson in “check the simple stuff first, stupid”.

When I was in college, one of the frats bragged about their new huge deck. They threw a party to celebrate its construction. As a woman, there was no cover charge for me to participate. There was dancing on the deck, there was a large sound system, and they cooked all sorts of meat on a massive grill. Someone had even set up an above-ground swimming pool on the deck.

I grabbed a drink and eventually stepped away from it to go to the bathroom. I returned to it, drank it… and quickly started feeling weird. I crawled out of the party, curled up under a parked car, and went to sleep.

When I woke up, it was morning, and where the deck used to be was a massive mess. I later read in the news that the deck had been overloaded and collapsed. Many people were injured; some had even caught fire when the grill had broken as part of the collapse.

The police had arrested almost everyone involved, including the injured folks, for permit violations, underage drinking, noise violations, loading the deck beyond capacity — whatever excuses they could find to throw someone in the tank. But they had missed me, curled up under the car as I was.

I never again stepped onto a deck without asking about its structural capacity, and I never again drank a drink I had left unattended.

A couple of years after I qualified as a Red Cross Water Safety Instructor, I was helping out teaching Senior Life Savers at the university pool. We had a swim team member in the class who was enormous; he was heavily muscled and two meters (6’6″) tall. He enjoyed picking on people, especially women — pushing them into the pool and dunking them — being a pest before class, and not paying attention to techniques in class. He thought he was too strong and too good at swimming to have any trouble with rescues.

For the final practical test, we teachers were assigned to be “drowning victims” for the students, and none of the other teachers wanted to work with this guy. I volunteered, but in me, he got a “panicky” victim, who tried to grab him and climb on top. Since he hadn’t learned the techniques, he tried to overpower me with pure strength, and I guarantee that doesn’t work well when the victim is pushing and grabbing. When he finally wrestled me into the towing position, he was exhausted — and so was I — but he thought his troubles were over.

On the way back to the pool edge, I lifted my legs out of the water, which pushed him under and made him struggle — all while using bad techniques that ended up choking me and making me “panic” again.

He was completely exhausted when we got to the pool edge, and the examiner (who knew exactly what I had done and why) failed him and told him he had to do the whole test over.

On the retest, he used all the right techniques and had a “cooperative” victim. He listened after that.

My roommate during my freshman year of college grew up fairly rich and spoiled but, thankfully, not as entitled as some kids in her position can get. Despite our different lifestyles, we generally got along; we had our differences, but we were able to respect each other’s personal space as much as possible while being crammed in a typical college dorm room.

For the first month of school, she would go home to her parents’ house every weekend with all of her dirty laundry. I didn’t think anything of this at first; lots of college kids don’t know how to do laundry, but apparently, that wasn’t her problem.

She came into our dorm one Thursday afternoon in a bad mood.

Me: “Hey, [Roommate]. Something bugging you?”

Roommate: “My parents are going on vacation this weekend.”

Me: “Cool for them. Where are they going?”

Roommate: “It doesn’t matter. They’re not going to be home, and I can’t go with them.”

Me: “Your first weekend on campus! If you need ideas on things to do, I can see if there’s anything fun going on.”

Roommate: “I don’t care about that! I’ll find something to do. But how am I going to wash my clothes?”

Me: “There’s a laundry room down in the basement. I can show you where it is if you’ve never been down there, and I can show you how the machines work if you don’t know what to do.”

Roommate: “I know how to wash them; I do my own laundry at home. I just can’t wash my clothes here because what if someone takes them?”

Me: “I don’t think anybody cares. As long as you get your clothes out of the machine right away when they’re done, all the girls in the building are good about not messing with other people’s stuff.”

Roommate: *Scoffing* “Really, [My Name]? My shirts all cost at least $60. All of my jeans are around $150. What if someone steals them to sell them on Craigslist or something?”

Me: “If you’re really concerned, there’s a table and a few chairs in the laundry room. You can always bring your laptop with you and sit down there. I do that sometimes if I don’t feel like going up and down the stairs that many times.”

She gave me a groan but decided to let me show her down to the laundry room. I showed her the machines and the table and chairs.

Roommate: “I guess I can wash them here, but it’s so dark, and those chairs are so uncomfortable. I couldn’t stand sitting down here for ninety minutes. Maybe you can sit down here and watch my clothes for me since you already do that anyway? I can probably pay you $10, and you can use your detergent and dryer sheets so I don’t need to buy anything?”

Me: “I’ll do that on one condition. You have to come down with me to set up the washing machine the way you want it, and then you have to come down ninety minutes later to take your clothes out of the dryer. I can switch them over from the washing machine to the dryer if you tell me what settings you want the dryer on.”

She agreed to that deal, and she actually held up her end of the deal. Every month or so, her parents would go on vacation, and I would get an easy $10 to “guard her clothes” while I washed my own laundry. I also got a private, quiet ninety minutes of study time because we always did our laundry on Saturday morning before anyone else in the building was awake enough to do laundry. Not a bad deal in my opinion.