"Are you busy?" calls Tim. He comes to me. "Because if you are, feel free to tell me to bugger off. I just need your help for a minute, if you could." Indeed, I have just finished what I was working on, so I go to help him out.
Tim is a lab technician. I see him every Monday and Thursday as I work in the labs on my final year project. He cusses and talks to himself. He grins at you madly when he catches your eye. He watches BBC news on the web at lunchtime, as he munches his way through an entire shopping bag of lunchtime goodies. He is enjoyable company.
I am not sure why Tim is where he is, exactly. He left school to work as a technician for the university. Work, that is, not study, but he soon decided he did want a degree after all, and is somehow now simultaneously a technician and a student of electrical engineering who doesn't really spend time around other students. It is his job to fix the magnetism department's machines and to build random electrical toys. Toys - I don't undertand either - like a ball bearing rail gun.
Or today's aluminium-disc-jumps-skyward-for-no-readily-discernable-
reason-or-purpose thing. He is adding more capactiors to it so that the disc can jump higher.
"Right," says Tim, handing me a stick of wood. "I just need you to be here in case anything goes wrong. It's highly unlikely, but it might, so I need you to be ready with that stick." I should point out that the stick is about 1 m long, 5 cm in diameter and completely solid. "Stand back in case anything blows up. If I electrocute myself you need to beat me with this stick until I let go of the electrics."
Sometimes I really love the occupational hazards of my subject.
Monday 3 December 2007
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