Thursday 28 January

This day was full of confusion. First of all, sleep depravation was getting on my nerves and I started a conversation by email with the Accommodation office about people outside my window and the possibility of changing to another room in my corridor, facing the opposite side of the building. They would now by Tuesday, but did I know where else I would like to move? No I said, can we meet and talk since I do not know Oxford? I replied. That was the last I heard from them.

It is the sign of our time. Once, it was a sure way of assessing how serious a business was on the net: Do they leave an address, a phone number? The result probably was too much customer contact. Problem is, I guess that customers are not always serious either. Still, business today seem to prefer to distance themselves from the customers. They simulate customer relations rather than having them. I guess I am old fashioned, wanting to meet and talk to people.

Someone, as professor Buckland later put it, in administration came up with the brilliant idea of having the first Monday of week one on Thursday week zero. So all Monday classes where scheduled for Thursday. However, teachers didn’t find it altogether such a spiffing idea at all. So all over university foreign students were lost as our late enrollment added us to the mail lists too late for us to get the cancellation messages. All in all, Thursday amounted to nothing.

My only joy was however joy enough for any day. And I printed an archtic picture to put on my wall. I can do a A1 printout for £7, and actually cover my walls with pictures of the most beautiful, brilliant and wonderful woman in the world.