101 fun things to learn, and I do mean learn, about U. York.
01) CompServ do not really care what you do, so long as it doesn’t get traced to
them, or be really illegal.
02) SSH has this cool function called port tunneling/port forwarding. Find a client
called PUTTY.
03) W2K systems are still not stable. Be aware. Outlook will lose all your email
if you give it a chance.
04) This is mainly a problem for people who were around when W95 prevailed.
05) It could be worse — they used to use Unix terminals.
06) If you are a fresher, you will be living on campus. Guarantee.
07) If you are living on campus, and going off it to get drunk, you will end up doing
illegal stuff.
08) The police here are surprisingly understanding.
09) Unless you are caught pissing, or as the plod thought, wanking, on the window
of La Senza after a night out at the Chinese next door.
10) Unless you yell ‘F**K OFF’ at them when they ask if you are all right.
11) If you see a WHITE FORD FOCUS ESTATE parked near where you are doing illegal
stuff, that is SECURITY. RUN. (Some muppet told them that that a WFFE was a nice,
common, anonymous car. Did anyone actually check how many there were of these things
near UoY? None, predictably.)
12) Anyone who sets of fire extinguishers is in deep s-h-one-t.
13) You will be verbally disciplined.
14) You will then be moved out of Goodricke C-Block to either Alcuin or Halifax at
no extra cost.
15) C-Block is officially a shithole.
16) The Provost said so.
17) If you turn on the oven on one of the Baby Belling cookers, you can then only
use one hob.
18) Do not irritate your cleaner. You will one day need them to cover for you.
19) The porters will cover for you, so long as you don’t break anything in the blocks
or get chased onto campus by a policeman.
20) You DO NOT need a TV licence on campus!
21) This is because: The TV licence people aren’t allowed on campus. If they do come
on, the porters tell them to sod off and don’t let them into the blocks. If they
get into the blocks, you don’t have to let them into your room — some tenancy thing.
22) The average distance of a window on campus from the lake is 45 feet. Most are
closer.
23) The average distance a 14 inch TV can be shot-putted is 30 feet. This increases
dramatically when done from a non-ground floor window.
24) No-one remembers anyone’s name they met in Freshers Week the week after.
25) James Corney shall be known as Half-Ten Boy, or the Goodricke Fister. For further
details, ask Lindsay.
26) Do not go near a rugby player in Ziggy’s on Wednesday unless you are prepared
to be bukkaked.
27) Look it up.
28) Gin is good.
29) White Strike is physically dangerous, will make you lose control of your body
functions, and you could well come badly unstuck.
30) Drunk people do not feel the cold.
31) Every fit bird has at least one minging mate. The reverse is not true. (I.E.
Not all mingers have a fit mate.)
32) Beer on Whiskey, always risky. Whiskey on Beer, never fear.
33) If you have someone to cover for you and the lecture notes are good, don’t bother
with 9.15’s after a night out.
34) IST 1 & 2 — Economics Dept. These modules are f**king difficult. You need
them for econometrics. Failing is a bad thing (TM).
35) I AM the Real Slim Shady.
36) There is a Vanbrugh Bridge Challenge. It is dangerous.
37) (One shot in a glass on top of each beam on the bridge between Vanbrugh and Goodricke.
Walk under the beam, hands on top, pull up, pick up glass in teeth, drink, drop to
bridge, repeat.)
38) If you can down 30 shots of 8 different spirits in under a minute, you probably
will die.
39) LeFT is the exception to this rule.
40) Puking is acceptable behaviour after 7PM any day of the week, earlier if you
have had an exam.
41) If you jam the kitchen door open and burn things, you WILL set off the smoke
alarm.
42) If you smoke in your room with the door open, you WILL set of the smoke alarm.
43) It is impossible to sleep through the sleep alarm.
44) It _is_ possible to wake up due to the smoke alarm and go straight back to sleep.
45) The Housing List comes from the building opposite Costcutters with the sign saying
Student Services.
46) The SU currently appear to be some of the most corrupt bastards this side of
Richard Milhous Nixon.
47) To wit; Tom Connor going out with Ffffffffiiiiion.
48) The Athletic Union do surprisingly well despite the circumstances.
49) To wit; the Students Union.
50) The fountain in the lake is actually a free-floating ish thing. Attempting to
stand on it will result in you falling back into the lake.
51) The lake is not as dangerous as people would have you believe — you can swim
in it and have surprisingly good chances of surviving.
52) The Health Centre are great if you know what is wrong with you and how to treat
it.
53) The fish in the lake are carp, and inedible.
54) If you hurt or damage or imprison any of the ducks/geese/waterfowl around the
lake, you will be thrown out. Period. No questions on this one.
55) The LoCSOC (Legalisation of Cannabis Campaign) are in fact not ratified as a
society. This needs to be passed by a quorate UGM.
56) The only things having been proven to get a UGM quorate are the SU budget, which
gives the AU money; and the resolution moving for no-confidence in the SU President.
57) Differential rents are a policy that the SU made up on their own on the basis
of a misconducted poll of misinformed students. Basically, Diff. Rent is where people
with en-suite pay the same as C-Block. This sucks.
58) Perfect Pizza, now Papa Johns; Dominos; and Pizza Hut are the only pizzas that
taste as good the following morning as they did the night before if microwaved for
1 min 15 s.
59) Lancaster are the opposition at Roses — annual sporting festival. Every other
year, you can go and kip on a lecture floor and get drunk somewhere else for the
mere sum of a tenner bus fare.
60) Every other year, they come and do the same here, which results in things being
broken at home.
61) Derwent has the best events.
62) Halifax tends to do better drinks promotions.
63) Derwent almost had a ‘complete’ Sky package — including the Adult Channel. This
failed to happen by one vote on their JCR.
64) A College JCR is the student body that influences the running of the college.
It’s fun.
65) The supermarket is up near the library and CompSci.
66) CompSci stands for Computer Science. This is the big building on the left of
the proper library (JBM)
67) The building on the right of the proper library (JBM) is some sort of Humanities
library where the ever-so-hardworking history students can camp out when they realise
they have circa. 6500 words to write, 25 books to read, and approximately 143 hours
to do it.
68) The big black walkway down from Costcutters to Vanbrugh is dangerous when wet.
Do not attempt to cycle down it when it is wet or between XX.10 and XX.20, due to
the fact that lectures start/finish at XX.15.
69) The Retreat (quick route onto Heslington Road and thus to town) has a sign saying
do not use at night. This is bo***ks. The other route is three times as long and
liable to get you lost.
70) As far as anyone official need know, when you are drunk, you cannot read or are
temporarily dyslexic.
71) The SU is officially the property of Goodricke College — this is their post address.
72) You can get anything delivered.
73) Keys in the ‘mature’ (q.v. on the verge of collapse, and older than the Mir space
station was) blocks fit other doors. GA011 and GA120, GA026 and VC116c ish for certain.
74) Crap music is known as cheese and played at most campus events. Only exceptions
are Prognosis and Breakz (Vanbrugh) and Dust and Cooker (Goodricke).
75) G-Spot publicity is highly collectable, as the SU keeps trying to ban it, and
so might not be around for long.
76) Common consensus is that this is because the SU Prez realises he got done.
77) History students really DO only have two hours a week official time in the third
term of first year.
78) Sales of Championship Manager and the GTA series are highest amongst history
students.
79) The only way to get an email address that is vaguely memorable is to either buy
a domain name (q.v. The-Shirt.co.uk) or have four letters in your name — e.g. adgj
as this usually results in a 100 username — adgj100
80) If you live on the ground floor of a building, and leave your window open, you
WILL get done over. You will lose anything up to and including a PS2.
81) Barbecues are OK around the blocks, so long as you don’t make a huge amount of
noise or set fire to any nearby trees.
82) Whether music is deemed ‘offensive’ usually depends upon the porters liking it
or not.
83) PhD students can usually be seen to cringe at the name of Andrei Ellmann.
84) Lecturers will turn up either fifteen minutes late or on time. In either case,
they do NOT ever overrun.
85) Learning their patterns can give you up to another ten minutes of valuable sleep.
86) Lambrini, if you can stomach it, will get you very drunk very quick. If you have
not met Lambrini, also trading under the names Fruscato/Fruscati/Lambrati, you will
shortly, as a litre and a bit can be had for a quid and a bit.
87) If you throw up in the toilets and fail to get it all in the bowl — be prepared
for this, it happens to the best of us — the cleaner will be mightily pissed off,
yell and shriek, and eventually get it cleaned up.
88) While this is happening, either blame the person who has gone away for the weekend
or the person who it really was and is not coming out of their room any time soon.
89) Distilling your own alcohol is illegal. And it doesn’t taste nearly as good as
the cheap Aldi vodka.
90) Find the local geeks and make friends. They will usually turn out to be complete
lunatics and as such, fun; or will never be seen until your computer breaks and you
suddenly need someone to get it working again.
91) The lake was once the largest plastic-lined lake in Europe. It is now the largest
chair and broken glass filled lake in certainly the UK, and quite possibly Europe.
92) The bars on campus have a standard cheap pint. Usually Carling, or occasionally
Carlsberg, this goes for 1.50 to 1.60. This is not the cheapest in the country, but
is cheaper than London.
93) All barmaids/barmen know how to make Snakebite. (AKA Purple/Diesel.)
94) Stealing glasses is definitely out. Especially Wentworth, as it’s post-grad only
and so harder to fill up to the point where they lose track of the glasses.
95) The G-Spot punch is built as follows: 4 litres vodka; 6 bottles Lambrini; 1.5
litres Archersalike; 12 bottles of Tango/Lemonade in quantities to suit. Serves many.
Or approx 5 Shirts.
96) The ‘Serves’ number on the side of things is even more fabricated at CostCutter
than anywhere else on the Planet.
97) If you want to stay up here at any point in the summer holidays and work, you
need to get it sorted before the summer holidays start.
98) Recruitment agencies are happy to take you on — make up a CV during Week 5 of
Summer Term and take it round a lot of them before the end of term. They will sort
you out with temporary stuff that pays usually the right side of a fiver an hour
for base manual labour.
99) Find a knife sharpener — knives will be blunt in a hurry with several people
using them.
100) Music will be a problem — learn to tolerate loud music when you are trying to
sleep.
101) Do not fail resits, or you’ll have to redo your first year. This is bad.
For those of you quibbling over whether it is a point or not, and in fact a corollory,
I say get bent. There are more points coming, which will mean that after a while
there will be 101 proper points. But now I have to sleep, a night shift approcheth.
1918/01/10/02
102) Cheap stuff at Lowther - whisky, gin, archers, bacardi, vodka, and something
else.
103) Cheap stuff at Gallery - whisky, gin, vodka, Heineken and whatever's on special
at Jon's Mega Discount Alcohol Shop and Turpentine Distillery.