Of Students and student things

Now I have to come clean here: I was once an undergraduate myself. So this may count as the pot calling the kettle black (a phrase in its self appropriate to the days of open fires heating utensils and so diminishing fast from our collective consciousness). Understand then that I write this with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight.

My company employs a few students. In the past I have tried this without success, may be it’s the fact that they are now in debt for their course fees or I’m recruiting from exactly the right cross section of society. As an old friend observed when we were discussing this over a dinner, in our days, in this situation we probably would have been awkward SOBs who would not have taken “yes” or indeed “no” for an answer! If we understood the problem, we would have then spent our time looking at it from every angle and insisting that our (new) way of providing a solution was far better than the one requested urgently by the boss. Definitely not worth employing!!

Employing students is not without its hazards: hygiene being the most prominent. After a gentle persuasion that a coffee cup was recyclable by virtue that it could be washed and used again. This process demonstrated its ultra modern green credentials. This was opposed to the “green” as in mould (which could naturally be encouraged by the significantly less energetic approach of leaving it hidden in some warm part the office for a suitable number of weeks).

Armed with one success, you need to know this is only the first step of several. The next phase of student coersion has still to be undertaken. A fine example of this was the purchase of new mugs. At this point we had not discovered the gravitational forces that caused the cups to be promoted to a bioengineering role and accumulate in selected culture friendly locations. The new mugs had stickers on them which were apparently impossible to remove. This difficulty frustrated all attempts to resolve over several days. It therefore came as some surprise to those finding this insuperable obstacle that the application of hot soapy water caused the adhesive labels to simply float off. The degree of wonderment that this revelation provoked can only be likened to a million pound lottery win. Clearly the combination of hot, soapy and water was an incredibly rare and possibly previously unencountered magical combination.

So what is it with students? Its actually a reasonably well know fact that the reason for the appellations “spotty” and “teenager” going hand in hand is that their body's immune systems are at their height during these years. More recently its been discovered that an over hygienic environment can lead to allergies caused by immune systems spoiling for a fight. These symptoms can be relieved by giving the body something to work on: for instance hook worms. It seems reasonable to assume that students somehow inherantly understand that giving their immune system something to fight by actively embarrassing scruffy, untidy, lets not beat about the bush, dirty surroundings are simply protecting themselves from other allergic reactions.

Now all I have to do is explain why students are able to detect those special properties of sunlight before midday so causing a vampire like aversion to the early hours (6am to 2pm)

PS If you enjoyed this, you may also like Tom Roush's blog