oloriel | This is a crazy world full of crazy people.

…

Waiting in line for Prof.K.’s office hour. Some official person has interrupted the prof-to-student talk in order to plan someone-or-other’s farewell party. Prof. K. explains that he won’t be there, as he’s leaving this weekend for a month’s research in Cambridge.
“Have a good time in Cambridge then,” says the official person. “Although I guess at this time of year it’s nasty and wet.”
“It’s paradise, even when nasty and wet,” Prof. K. says, “for me, minor demon of this here Limbo.”
The waiting students can’t help but snicker.
“You didn’t hear that,” says he, realising that we all overheard.
“Noooooooo,” we chorus, all innocently wide-eyed.

…

There’s a bottleneck when you leave the Autobahn 57 from Cologne and drive onto the Autobahn 1 to Dortmund. When there’s a lot of traffic, it’s hard to change lanes because of course nobody leaves enough room between cars and nobody will let anybody else in (that’d mean five seconds delay, the horror!), so you have to stop at the end of the turning lane until there’s room. I had to do that today, rather abruptly, because there was a warning triangle (and, twenty meters beyond that, a car with a puncture) in the middle of the emergency lane on which I could otherwise have rolled on.
Guy driving behind me (also too close) accordingly had to brake as well.
Guy driving behind him didn’t manage to brake hard enough, and hit the car behind me.

I only heard the crash and thought Shit, that’s it, now what? but in fact my car hadn’t even been touched. Since I had stopped and gotten out, though, I thought it would look rather stupid (and rather like hit-and-run, hit or no hit) if I just drove away, so I waited for the police along with the two guys with the damaged cars (both BMWs). Both were polite with each other, there was little question of whose fault it was, but it was cold and windy and generally unpleasant. (I always get the impression that people involved in an accident without injuries or severe wreckage or traffic hindrance do something good for all the other drivers, because they can all go “Phew, thank [Deity of choice] that’s not me” (or “Hah hah, look at those idiots” – we all know that Schadenfreude is the most genuine kind of happiness…).)
Police came and took everybody’s name and address, told me that I had nothing to do with it but they’d list me as a witness and that it had at any rate been right not to drive away although I wasn’t directly involved.

The guy whose car had been hit, the one behind me, told us how he would still be at work at this time under normal circumstances, but today they’d found an old aircraft bomb from WWII close to his workplace so everybody had been evacuated and sent home early. Otherwise he wouldn’t even have been there.
Stupid WWII bombers.

…

Colleague at work randomly stapled his finger. Because he wanted to know whether the stapler could penetrate his skin and didn’t think it would.
Well, it did. Shot the staple three or four millimetres into his finger, too.

“I wanted to know whether it could do that,” he says while M. and I stare at him, thinking (for once) along the same lines.

…

At least Prof. K. gave his blessing for the concept and structure of my paper. He even seemed mildly enthusiastic about it, which is hard to achieve in this here Limbo at the end of another frustrating semester. Yay.
He did warn me that I might have to narrow it down a bit (and I already left two points from the original concept out!) because I only have 20 pages after all. He’s probably right. I have material enough for probably twice, perhaps thrice as much. I should use this topic for my master’s thesis, not waste it on a term paper.
Eh well.