I’m alive! And awake too, even with four hours sleep.
I flatter myself in believing that you will be glad to know that all 80+ pages of work turned out acceptably. Gosh, I had a hell of a time printing. I try to do the right thing and print double sided but what a headache. If you have multiple Microsoft Word ‘sections’, it’s virtually impossible to get Word to print the page you want. “Page 2? Which page 2? Oh, I’ll just print a random page 2, how about that?”
Yesterday, I had economics until 9 PM, then I planned to rush home to finish my project. As is our custom, it was my turn to drive Kate to her car at the end of the night. We had a nice chat on that two minute trip to the other side of uni, up the three levels of parking, then pulling up next to her car. She started rummaging through her bag for her car keys. Hmm, not there. Time to pull things out of her bag in a steady unpanicked way. Soon everything was on the ground — still no keys. It’s our last resort, but we peek into her car. There they were, dangling in the ignition behind Locked Door Number 1. Aiya.
Kate called RACV for roadside assistance. They said they would be there in ten to thirty minutes. Kate urged me to go home to do my work (uncharacteristically, Kate had finished her project one whole day early!) but you can’t leave a girl waiting outside a locked car at 9 PM in the middle of the third storey of a carpark! Of course I stayed. We spent the next twenty minutes walking in clockwise circuits around the carpark. This initially disturbed me out because I’m used to skating and dancing anti-clockwise but being the adaptable person I am, I soon got the hang of it.
The next ten minutes, we spent locked up in my car because some boys drove up and started “loitering”.
At 9:30 PM, the yellow mini-truck arrived and the nice RACV man gave Kate and I some tips about breaking into a car. Instead of fiddling with the door lock, the RACV man drove a wedge into the back window frame, popped the glass open, got a curved rod and managed to wind down the window. After that, it was a simple matter of reaching in and opening the back door, then opening the front door and getting the keys out. Hurrah! We were most impressed. But one question remained — What would he have done if the car had power windows?
How would power windows have changed anything? What kind of car was it? Some cars are easier to break into with a coat hanger wire bent into the shape of a “j”. Picking car door locks is really really difficult. (don’t ask me where I learnt all this).
You should skate clockwise more often, otherwise you get muscle imbalances which can affect your maximum performance because it puts a greater load on your stabilizer muscle groups.
D
I agree. Picking car locks with a coathanger is a lot harder than it sounds. It’s hard to get enough force to lift the button thing with just the edge of a steel rod. (This was learnt when my parents locked their keys in their car. Luckily now we have a car alarm, so the driver never locks his door, it gets locked automatically when you hit the button to activate the car alarm).
Which brings me to my next question: what happens if you do that to a car with a car alarm? Surely that would look pretty dodgy. But I guess the RACV gey was there, so it’d be alright.
-J (following the “signing off with only one letter” trend)
Usually, the RACV people try to jimmy the door lock but Kate’s door lock is broken, making it even harder to break into (RACV has tried it before!). So the RACV man went around the problem by winding down the back window, squeezing his arm through and opening the door.
If the car had power windows, well, you can’t wind down the windows.
I do skate clockwise about a third of the time. Sometimes, when I feel particularly daring, I’ll skate in a straight line too!
JKo