(no subject)
Getting a post started after you've been away for a while is always slightly tricky. What do you use for a catchy opening line? Something funny? Something deep? Something hopefullyintellectual but inevitably pretentious?
The traditional declaration of not-deadness?
Or you could avoid the question entirely and write a self-referencing paragraph.
So the last nineteen days have been insanely busy, WHICH IS NEW AND SHOCKING. I've been trying to keep mental notes of everything interesting or funny or just plain weird that's happened, but I lost track somewhere around day two. So here're the usuals.
Well, sort of.
Reasons why I love my job
For starters, it's giving me money. I finally got my first paycheck and man, it's fantastic to have a living cashflow again. Especially because my financial situation was starting to get a little dire. As it stands, I have the following debts:
Dad: £1200
Soph: £400 (and something)
Bank: £1500
But now I have money flowing again! And I'm starting to chip away at the Mountain of Cash I Owe. It's slow going, but it's going, so I'm notparticularly worried.
And it's not all toil. I blew half of my first paycheck on a set of cheap bookshelves and very own sofa. I got them home (with Soph's help), assembled them ALL BY MYSELF, and they have not yet disintegrated! I am very proud.
I may also have blown a good chunk of my second paycheck on three or four books. >.> But in my defence, they are awesome books. Red Seas Under Red Skies, by Scott Lynch; The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss; and Beguilement, by Lois McMaster Bujold. All three recommended by kilerkki, so I blame her entirely.
And none of this cut has actually been about my job. *amused* At the moment, it's going pretty well. I've spent most of this week doing sits -- which does not actually involve sitting on the clients. Some of our more complicated clients need 24 hour care, so instead of doing eight or nine morning calls (for example), you'll spend eight hours hanging around one home and doing specific personal care for that one client, which usually involves something extra. Like throat suctioning, or cough assist.
Sits are sort of good news/bad news. You get paid a lot more, but you also do a lot of sitting around and being bored (hence the name). I've been doing sits for two different guys. Guy A is a severe stroke victim who's been recently released from hospital. Guy B is a fairly young (well, for us; he's about fifty) paraplegic currently trying to fight off a chest infection. He ended up in hospital last week, but your average doctor or nurse isn't familiar with cough assist (which involves watching him all the time to do it the second he needs it, otherwise you're looking at aspiration and death), so he took his whole carer team in with him. Again, good news/bad news. The nurses hate us, but I learned a lot of interesting things about the average hospital day on my ten hour shift. And I had time to sit down and write jbmcdragon half a letter. :D
And I actually managed to wrangle today and tomorrow off! My dad needed some dog-sitting doing, so I booked the days off work, but I still get pay from dad! Huzzah!
For the rest of this week, I'm doing an insane shift on Thursday, a sit on Friday, another sit on Saturday, and a seriously insane shift on Sunday. But it's all good. And I still love my job. :D
How we've survived the new house
Just barely. In true student-house fashion it has a bunch of weird little foibles, mostly caused by the previous tenants. We moved in over two days, and I've spent my precious free time since doing nothing but unpacking, hammering up mirrors and pictures and curtain fasteners, and trying to sort out all the minor oddities that crop up when you're learning the ropes in a new place.
For starters, Soph's cellar bedroom has rising damp coming through the outer brick wall of her walk-in closet.
And the bottom drawer of the freezer is mysteriously missing.
And a corner of the kitchen ceiling has water damage.
And the whole place smelled like old ladies, which I know for a fact.
But my personal favourite moment was the magical Thursday when I managed to get a four hour break in the middle of the day, and decided to take a nice long bath. Y'see, our old house only had a shower, so I hadn't taken a bath in two years. You better believe I was going to do it properly. I had bubble bath, candles, bath bombs, weird little smelly soap things, at least five different scrubbing brushes, and a very good book. It was glorious. The water was beautifully warm, the air was filled with gentle steam, the candle smelled burnt sugar...
And after five minutes, Soph came running up the stairs to tell me there was water pouring through the kitchen ceiling.
"Right," I said slowly, and regarded the small puddle of water I'd splashed on the floor. "I think it'll be fine in two minutes."
"Coming through the ceiling," Soph yelled through the door.
"FIRST BATH IN TWO YEARS!" I yelled back, directing a vengeful look at the rubber duck. "IT'LL STOP IN A MINUTE. ALL THE WATER'S IN THE BATH WITH ME."
She went back downstairs. There was five minutes of glittering peace--then she came back up.
"It's coming down the walls!"
"Of course it is," I muttered, beyond disgruntled, and got out of the bath. I dried off, put my clothes back on, and stomped down the stairs expecting to find a spectacle of overexaggeration.
There was a bucket under the light fixture, catching the stream of water making a magnificent waterfall from the lampshade, long damp marks spreading down the walls, and an inch-deep lake doing its best to swallow the floor. In the middle of all this, Soph stood with a mop in one hand, a kitchen towel in the other, and a pointed look on her face. "Told you."
I rolled my trousers up. "Shuddup."
She thew a dishcloth at me.
But the landlord's been fantastic. He's young, Indian, looks very much like Cesar Millan, and has been out to our place almost every other day to get things fixed. The outer brick wall in Soph's closest is getting bricked up from the inside with damp-killing materials; the kitchen ceiling is being repainted; the missing freezer drawer was thoroughly laughed about; and the flooded kitchen was regarded with the best look of holy crap I've ever seen on someone's face.
It turned out the U-bend overflow pipe had been removed from the bath, so all the overflow water just dropped straight through the kitchen ceiling. If anyone can give me a good reason for removing the overflow pipe from a bath, I'd love to hear it.
But it's been replaced now, and I managed to get a bath the other day that was so fantastically magnificent I fell asleep for ninety minutes.
And we have candles everywhere, so the air smells really sweet now.
I kind of love our house.
Ways I have injured myself
Surprisingly, I haven't managed to do anything drastic to myself since I sliced my thumb open while trying to clean candlesticks. And that was April of '08. O.o
Two days ago, I woke up and noticed my left wrist felt oddly twingy. By mid-morning, it hurt. By lunchtime, it really hurt. By the afternoon, it was agonizing. And by bedtime, it had swollen enough that I couldn't move my hand.
Oh excellent, I thought. Just what I need when my job requires heavy lifting.
I'd tied on a lame bandage around lunchtime, which Soph's mum helped improve by re-knotting the ends into a bow. At bedtime I put Deep Heat on it, took some painkillers, and decided to ignore it until it felt better. Yesterday morning it was less swollen, but still painful.
Soph suggested a sling. Seeing as I'd never had the excuse opportunity to wear one before and my job provides me with a free medi-kit, sling inclusive, I went with that. As it turns out, slings are bloody awkward. I'm right handed, so I figured I'd be pretty much okay with my left hand tied up, but it's amazing how much you use your weaker hand without noticing. Driving stick shift, for example. Or pouring juice, which apparently I can't do with my right hand. Supporting whatever book I'm reading. Typing. Steadying paper I want to write on. Pulling on socks. Opening bottles. Putting in hair gel...
But the thing that gets me most, is that I have no idea how I hurt my wrist. jbmcdragon suggested tendinitis, which seems like a likely bet. I picked up a much better bandage yesterday (one of the stiff ones that sticks to itself and works a bit like a flexible splint), and a proper sling because the one from my medkit was an awful, sweat-inducing piece of flimsy crap, and they help a lot. With any luck, I'll be okay by Thursday and can go back to work. *crosses fingers, carefully*
Why Dark will never help an academic colleague ever again
I'm studying Counselling, a subject generally based on the concept of empathy. So it's no great surprise that when one of our coursemates is having issues, everyone else tries to help them out. Soph and I are currently getting the highest grades, so we tend to get asked a lot-- especially Soph, because she's sweet and crazy and doesn't mind spending six hours in the library trying to talk a panicking idiot through the basic steps of whatever. I tend more towards tossing notes and old essays at people, and telling them which books to read.
Anyone who's been to university will notice the fatal flaw in that last sentence.
As it turns out, if you give someone one of your essays and they're dumb enough to copy 70% of it verbatim and submit it as their own work, you get in trouble, too. It's called collusion, and it sucks. Typical punishments are:
1) You scrub the module entirely and repeat it next year. [The strictest punishment for a second year with a first offence.]
2) You resubmit the assignment and get your mark capped at 40%, which is a D-grade. [The most lenient punishment for a second year with a first offence.]
But first you get a letter informing you that you need to attend an academic misconduct meeting in the next two weeks--or you would, if you've remembered to inform the university that you've moved house. If you've neglected that particular step, you'll get a text the day before the meeting asking you to confirm that you're going to attend it.
You might have the following reaction: "...?!"
Now, I'd had all my essays back, which doesn't happen if you're going to get yanked up for something. So as far as I knew, there were no issues with my work.
But Idiot Coursemate had submitted her work late, so nobody clued into the minor plagiarism issue until after I'd had my results back.
I called up the office, found out a few basic details about the issue (i.e. someone had copied my work and no, they couldn't tell me who), and then went and vented to Soph for a bit. She suggested it was probably Idiot Coursemate. I went upstairs with the intention of emailing Idiot Coursemate, and found this in my inbox:
hi dark
hope u ok? iv bin meaning to email u but jus bin busy with the weddin, basicall wot it is is that i used ur spider phobia essay as a guide and nw ther doing me for plagerism but u dnt need to worry because i am taking all the blame so it will not effect you and iv also said that you didnt knw anythin about it. i ave basically sed that ' u wer helping me with the essay and that we wer looking at your notes i took ur notes and in ther was ur essay you didnt knw and nor did i at the time and then after i got stressed and used bits out of it' so if they ask you jus say you wer helpin me and u didnt knw tht ur essay was in the notes i am really sorry about this and as i sed it should effect you because im taking all the blame i would like it if wwe could keep this between ourselves i am srry agen if u need to contact me my number is [...]
tc
hope to see u at the wedding,
[Idiot Coursemate].
Which put me in something of a bind, because I had given her my essay and I was prepared to accept the consequences for that, even if they sucked. But she called me up five minutes after her email and gave me a whole speech about how she didn't want to drag me down, and how awful she felt, and how she couldn't live with herself if she tanked my degree along with hers, etc etc.
"Okay," I said finally, feeling some inner piece of morality smack its head against the wall. "Okay, okay. I'll go along with it."
"Oh brilliant," she said, and hung up.
"Yeah," I sighed. "Brilliant."
I walked up to uni early to meet Idiot Coursemate, and also to work out how long it takes to walk there from our new place (about half an hour). It was graduation day for a lot of students, so there were black robe and square tassel-hats everywhere, and lots of parents taking photographs. It's an extremely odd experience to weave your way to a disciplinary hearing through a whole parcel of celebrating students. They're all so happy, and you are very much... not.
You'll be pleased to hear I didn't kick anyone.
Met up with Idiot Coursemate, who was due to have her meeting about an hour before I had mine, and she took me along to see the Student Advice people. It turns out that every student is entitled to have a rep appear at their side during one of these meetings, mostly for moral support, but also because they know every inch of the rules and they can advise you to the best course of action.
A mini-lawyer, if you like.
"Right!" said one of them brightly, "Where's your letter?"
"Doormat of my old house, most likely."
"Oh. Um. Okay."
"She didn't find out about this until yesterday," Idiot Coursemate interjected helpfully.
"Oh dear," said mini-lawyer #1. "Right. Okay, in that case, I'm going to take Idiot Coursemate to her meeting, and you need to talk with mini-lawyer #2 for a bit."
"Hi!" said mini-lawyer #2. "What'd you do to your arm?"
"Something karmic," I muttered, and sat down.
Mini-lawyer #2 took me through all the rules and regs and showed me exactly how screwed I was--which, surprisingly, wasn't actually a lot. If we went along with Idiot Coursemate's cunning scheme, chances were good I'd get off completely free.
"Awesome!" I said, and went to the meeting, and proceeded to shoot myself in the foot. For the record, I am not a great liar when I don't actually want to tell the lie. It's just one of those things.
But the long and short of it is, I got found guilty of collusionism (collusioning?), and then got given a sentence so light they don't even have it on the books.
"...?" I said, deciding to keep my composure in case it was all a grand joke.
"Looking at the mitigating circumstances," the meeting guy said, in his soft Welsh accent. "I've decided that you have fallen on the wrong side of the rules and overstepped the boundary, but it was in the best of intentions. So you may keep your grade, but we'll put a record of one instance of academic misconduct on your transcript."
Translation: You were a moron, but a nice moron, so we're letting you off.
"Happy with that?" said mini-lawyer #1.
"Uh--well, um..."
"Of course this does mean that you have one strike on your record now, so any further instances of breaking any of the academic codes of conduct will most likely see you getting thrown off the course." Meeting guy gave me a significant look.
"Oh good," I said weakly. "Thanks for the heads up."
And that was that. After thinking about it, I'm really okay with that result. Because I did break the rules (a lot more than I admitted), and I was already prepared to face theconsequences (by, uh, lying and letting myself get swayed, but I was potentially prepared to accept the consequences >.>), but I managed to get off with a slap on the wrist and a warning not to be stupid again.
Could be a lot worse.
Oh, and Idiot Coursemate? Definitely not going to her wedding.
The traditional declaration of not-deadness?
Or you could avoid the question entirely and write a self-referencing paragraph.
So the last nineteen days have been insanely busy, WHICH IS NEW AND SHOCKING. I've been trying to keep mental notes of everything interesting or funny or just plain weird that's happened, but I lost track somewhere around day two. So here're the usuals.
Well, sort of.
Reasons why I love my job
For starters, it's giving me money. I finally got my first paycheck and man, it's fantastic to have a living cashflow again. Especially because my financial situation was starting to get a little dire. As it stands, I have the following debts:
Dad: £1200
Soph: £400 (and something)
Bank: £1500
But now I have money flowing again! And I'm starting to chip away at the Mountain of Cash I Owe. It's slow going, but it's going, so I'm notparticularly worried.
And it's not all toil. I blew half of my first paycheck on a set of cheap bookshelves and very own sofa. I got them home (with Soph's help), assembled them ALL BY MYSELF, and they have not yet disintegrated! I am very proud.
I may also have blown a good chunk of my second paycheck on three or four books. >.> But in my defence, they are awesome books. Red Seas Under Red Skies, by Scott Lynch; The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss; and Beguilement, by Lois McMaster Bujold. All three recommended by kilerkki, so I blame her entirely.
And none of this cut has actually been about my job. *amused* At the moment, it's going pretty well. I've spent most of this week doing sits -- which does not actually involve sitting on the clients. Some of our more complicated clients need 24 hour care, so instead of doing eight or nine morning calls (for example), you'll spend eight hours hanging around one home and doing specific personal care for that one client, which usually involves something extra. Like throat suctioning, or cough assist.
Sits are sort of good news/bad news. You get paid a lot more, but you also do a lot of sitting around and being bored (hence the name). I've been doing sits for two different guys. Guy A is a severe stroke victim who's been recently released from hospital. Guy B is a fairly young (well, for us; he's about fifty) paraplegic currently trying to fight off a chest infection. He ended up in hospital last week, but your average doctor or nurse isn't familiar with cough assist (which involves watching him all the time to do it the second he needs it, otherwise you're looking at aspiration and death), so he took his whole carer team in with him. Again, good news/bad news. The nurses hate us, but I learned a lot of interesting things about the average hospital day on my ten hour shift. And I had time to sit down and write jbmcdragon half a letter. :D
And I actually managed to wrangle today and tomorrow off! My dad needed some dog-sitting doing, so I booked the days off work, but I still get pay from dad! Huzzah!
For the rest of this week, I'm doing an insane shift on Thursday, a sit on Friday, another sit on Saturday, and a seriously insane shift on Sunday. But it's all good. And I still love my job. :D
How we've survived the new house
Just barely. In true student-house fashion it has a bunch of weird little foibles, mostly caused by the previous tenants. We moved in over two days, and I've spent my precious free time since doing nothing but unpacking, hammering up mirrors and pictures and curtain fasteners, and trying to sort out all the minor oddities that crop up when you're learning the ropes in a new place.
For starters, Soph's cellar bedroom has rising damp coming through the outer brick wall of her walk-in closet.
And the bottom drawer of the freezer is mysteriously missing.
And a corner of the kitchen ceiling has water damage.
And the whole place smelled like old ladies, which I know for a fact.
But my personal favourite moment was the magical Thursday when I managed to get a four hour break in the middle of the day, and decided to take a nice long bath. Y'see, our old house only had a shower, so I hadn't taken a bath in two years. You better believe I was going to do it properly. I had bubble bath, candles, bath bombs, weird little smelly soap things, at least five different scrubbing brushes, and a very good book. It was glorious. The water was beautifully warm, the air was filled with gentle steam, the candle smelled burnt sugar...
And after five minutes, Soph came running up the stairs to tell me there was water pouring through the kitchen ceiling.
"Right," I said slowly, and regarded the small puddle of water I'd splashed on the floor. "I think it'll be fine in two minutes."
"Coming through the ceiling," Soph yelled through the door.
"FIRST BATH IN TWO YEARS!" I yelled back, directing a vengeful look at the rubber duck. "IT'LL STOP IN A MINUTE. ALL THE WATER'S IN THE BATH WITH ME."
She went back downstairs. There was five minutes of glittering peace--then she came back up.
"It's coming down the walls!"
"Of course it is," I muttered, beyond disgruntled, and got out of the bath. I dried off, put my clothes back on, and stomped down the stairs expecting to find a spectacle of overexaggeration.
There was a bucket under the light fixture, catching the stream of water making a magnificent waterfall from the lampshade, long damp marks spreading down the walls, and an inch-deep lake doing its best to swallow the floor. In the middle of all this, Soph stood with a mop in one hand, a kitchen towel in the other, and a pointed look on her face. "Told you."
I rolled my trousers up. "Shuddup."
She thew a dishcloth at me.
But the landlord's been fantastic. He's young, Indian, looks very much like Cesar Millan, and has been out to our place almost every other day to get things fixed. The outer brick wall in Soph's closest is getting bricked up from the inside with damp-killing materials; the kitchen ceiling is being repainted; the missing freezer drawer was thoroughly laughed about; and the flooded kitchen was regarded with the best look of holy crap I've ever seen on someone's face.
It turned out the U-bend overflow pipe had been removed from the bath, so all the overflow water just dropped straight through the kitchen ceiling. If anyone can give me a good reason for removing the overflow pipe from a bath, I'd love to hear it.
But it's been replaced now, and I managed to get a bath the other day that was so fantastically magnificent I fell asleep for ninety minutes.
And we have candles everywhere, so the air smells really sweet now.
I kind of love our house.
Ways I have injured myself
Surprisingly, I haven't managed to do anything drastic to myself since I sliced my thumb open while trying to clean candlesticks. And that was April of '08. O.o
Two days ago, I woke up and noticed my left wrist felt oddly twingy. By mid-morning, it hurt. By lunchtime, it really hurt. By the afternoon, it was agonizing. And by bedtime, it had swollen enough that I couldn't move my hand.
Oh excellent, I thought. Just what I need when my job requires heavy lifting.
I'd tied on a lame bandage around lunchtime, which Soph's mum helped improve by re-knotting the ends into a bow. At bedtime I put Deep Heat on it, took some painkillers, and decided to ignore it until it felt better. Yesterday morning it was less swollen, but still painful.
Soph suggested a sling. Seeing as I'd never had the excuse opportunity to wear one before and my job provides me with a free medi-kit, sling inclusive, I went with that. As it turns out, slings are bloody awkward. I'm right handed, so I figured I'd be pretty much okay with my left hand tied up, but it's amazing how much you use your weaker hand without noticing. Driving stick shift, for example. Or pouring juice, which apparently I can't do with my right hand. Supporting whatever book I'm reading. Typing. Steadying paper I want to write on. Pulling on socks. Opening bottles. Putting in hair gel...
But the thing that gets me most, is that I have no idea how I hurt my wrist. jbmcdragon suggested tendinitis, which seems like a likely bet. I picked up a much better bandage yesterday (one of the stiff ones that sticks to itself and works a bit like a flexible splint), and a proper sling because the one from my medkit was an awful, sweat-inducing piece of flimsy crap, and they help a lot. With any luck, I'll be okay by Thursday and can go back to work. *crosses fingers, carefully*
Why Dark will never help an academic colleague ever again
I'm studying Counselling, a subject generally based on the concept of empathy. So it's no great surprise that when one of our coursemates is having issues, everyone else tries to help them out. Soph and I are currently getting the highest grades, so we tend to get asked a lot-- especially Soph, because she's sweet and crazy and doesn't mind spending six hours in the library trying to talk a panicking idiot through the basic steps of whatever. I tend more towards tossing notes and old essays at people, and telling them which books to read.
Anyone who's been to university will notice the fatal flaw in that last sentence.
As it turns out, if you give someone one of your essays and they're dumb enough to copy 70% of it verbatim and submit it as their own work, you get in trouble, too. It's called collusion, and it sucks. Typical punishments are:
1) You scrub the module entirely and repeat it next year. [The strictest punishment for a second year with a first offence.]
2) You resubmit the assignment and get your mark capped at 40%, which is a D-grade. [The most lenient punishment for a second year with a first offence.]
But first you get a letter informing you that you need to attend an academic misconduct meeting in the next two weeks--or you would, if you've remembered to inform the university that you've moved house. If you've neglected that particular step, you'll get a text the day before the meeting asking you to confirm that you're going to attend it.
You might have the following reaction: "...?!"
Now, I'd had all my essays back, which doesn't happen if you're going to get yanked up for something. So as far as I knew, there were no issues with my work.
But Idiot Coursemate had submitted her work late, so nobody clued into the minor plagiarism issue until after I'd had my results back.
I called up the office, found out a few basic details about the issue (i.e. someone had copied my work and no, they couldn't tell me who), and then went and vented to Soph for a bit. She suggested it was probably Idiot Coursemate. I went upstairs with the intention of emailing Idiot Coursemate, and found this in my inbox:
hi dark
hope u ok? iv bin meaning to email u but jus bin busy with the weddin, basicall wot it is is that i used ur spider phobia essay as a guide and nw ther doing me for plagerism but u dnt need to worry because i am taking all the blame so it will not effect you and iv also said that you didnt knw anythin about it. i ave basically sed that ' u wer helping me with the essay and that we wer looking at your notes i took ur notes and in ther was ur essay you didnt knw and nor did i at the time and then after i got stressed and used bits out of it' so if they ask you jus say you wer helpin me and u didnt knw tht ur essay was in the notes i am really sorry about this and as i sed it should effect you because im taking all the blame i would like it if wwe could keep this between ourselves i am srry agen if u need to contact me my number is [...]
tc
hope to see u at the wedding,
[Idiot Coursemate].
Which put me in something of a bind, because I had given her my essay and I was prepared to accept the consequences for that, even if they sucked. But she called me up five minutes after her email and gave me a whole speech about how she didn't want to drag me down, and how awful she felt, and how she couldn't live with herself if she tanked my degree along with hers, etc etc.
"Okay," I said finally, feeling some inner piece of morality smack its head against the wall. "Okay, okay. I'll go along with it."
"Oh brilliant," she said, and hung up.
"Yeah," I sighed. "Brilliant."
I walked up to uni early to meet Idiot Coursemate, and also to work out how long it takes to walk there from our new place (about half an hour). It was graduation day for a lot of students, so there were black robe and square tassel-hats everywhere, and lots of parents taking photographs. It's an extremely odd experience to weave your way to a disciplinary hearing through a whole parcel of celebrating students. They're all so happy, and you are very much... not.
You'll be pleased to hear I didn't kick anyone.
Met up with Idiot Coursemate, who was due to have her meeting about an hour before I had mine, and she took me along to see the Student Advice people. It turns out that every student is entitled to have a rep appear at their side during one of these meetings, mostly for moral support, but also because they know every inch of the rules and they can advise you to the best course of action.
A mini-lawyer, if you like.
"Right!" said one of them brightly, "Where's your letter?"
"Doormat of my old house, most likely."
"Oh. Um. Okay."
"She didn't find out about this until yesterday," Idiot Coursemate interjected helpfully.
"Oh dear," said mini-lawyer #1. "Right. Okay, in that case, I'm going to take Idiot Coursemate to her meeting, and you need to talk with mini-lawyer #2 for a bit."
"Hi!" said mini-lawyer #2. "What'd you do to your arm?"
"Something karmic," I muttered, and sat down.
Mini-lawyer #2 took me through all the rules and regs and showed me exactly how screwed I was--which, surprisingly, wasn't actually a lot. If we went along with Idiot Coursemate's cunning scheme, chances were good I'd get off completely free.
"Awesome!" I said, and went to the meeting, and proceeded to shoot myself in the foot. For the record, I am not a great liar when I don't actually want to tell the lie. It's just one of those things.
But the long and short of it is, I got found guilty of collusionism (collusioning?), and then got given a sentence so light they don't even have it on the books.
"...?" I said, deciding to keep my composure in case it was all a grand joke.
"Looking at the mitigating circumstances," the meeting guy said, in his soft Welsh accent. "I've decided that you have fallen on the wrong side of the rules and overstepped the boundary, but it was in the best of intentions. So you may keep your grade, but we'll put a record of one instance of academic misconduct on your transcript."
Translation: You were a moron, but a nice moron, so we're letting you off.
"Happy with that?" said mini-lawyer #1.
"Uh--well, um..."
"Of course this does mean that you have one strike on your record now, so any further instances of breaking any of the academic codes of conduct will most likely see you getting thrown off the course." Meeting guy gave me a significant look.
"Oh good," I said weakly. "Thanks for the heads up."
And that was that. After thinking about it, I'm really okay with that result. Because I did break the rules (a lot more than I admitted), and I was already prepared to face theconsequences (by, uh, lying and letting myself get swayed, but I was potentially prepared to accept the consequences >.>), but I managed to get off with a slap on the wrist and a warning not to be stupid again.
Could be a lot worse.
Oh, and Idiot Coursemate? Definitely not going to her wedding.