The Lair

There is an accusation (vile and completely unfounded!!!oneone) written elsewhere that postgraduate students are unsociable. Clearly, this isn’t true. So untrue, in fact that I have my own little anecdote to support my case. Yesterday, we had a power failure. Quite unusual, it was only the second time that there had been any sort of power cut and the first time it happened during the day. In context, the last time there was a power failure was when lightening struck somewhere on campus and knocked down the a tree or something. So, middle of the day : one minute we’re staring at monitors and the next moment everything inside the department is plunged into twilight hues. This wasn’t some piddly little brown out, it was a do-not-pass-go, stop-the-electronic-clocks power failure. The servers were also shut down to prevent a UPS disaster, so we basically lost all our network capability at the same time.

A few minutes later, deprived of the comforting glow of LCDs and the ambient heat of number crunching CPUs, people started streaming out of their cubicles and offices. A few minutes of waiting around and it seemed obvious that the power wasn’t coming back on any time soon. So people started going around chatting. I actually chatted with people I hadn’t had a chance to speak to socially for … months. People that I wave at each morning and say hello to; but never get around to carrying out a conversation with … people like Robbo downstairs and Matt across the open plan area… those people. It was fun. The only other time in the year where we actually have a conversation like this is during the annual fire drill; always scheduled for the depths of winter when you must either speak or have a chilly arctic breeze freeze your cheeks into a mini-ice slab.

Unsociable? Not us. We just prefer IM to conversation. It’s by far more efficient to IM multiple people than speak to just one, clearly.

In other news, I watched “Diary of a mail order bride” last night. Nope, not like Memoirs of a Geisha at all, this was Channel 4’s documentary on (wait for it) mail order brides. The BBC runs a feature called 10 things we didn’t know last week on weekends. My entries for this week include the following:

• Mailorder bride sites are not always scams.
• Russia has a gender numbers disparity amounting to an excess of 10.5 million females… A bit of checking with the factbook appears to bear this factoid out.
• The “conversion rate” for successful matches was said to be between 5 and 7%. That’s about the same return as spammers and significantly better than the average online advertising campaign.
• There are actually people out there (if the documentary is to be believed) who’d make a declaration like “There are no suitable women in Texas, St. Petersburg is the place for me to find a wife” and expect to find women in Russia. Despite being somewhat ill prepared for the different environment and not knowing anything about the place or its people.

I don’t think I’m making a moral statement about the whole business of mailorder bride websites (questionable though the practice might be), but some of the stuff in that documentary was quite disturbing to me at some level. Perhaps it was the (as I perceived it) thin veneer of bravado masking the desperation and loneliness?