Elevated Madness

There comes a time in life where communication between friends dwindle to the once a year wishes of Happy Birthday, or one of those festive greetings via text message. About half of my friends over the ages have fallen into that category, and as terrible as it sounds, we all live with it and are somehow comfortable enough to think that it is sufficient in maintaining what was once known as friendship.

So, it was incredibly surprising for me to receive a text message from one of those friends yesterday... the last I heard from her was when she changed her number somewhere earlier this year. She told me that she had been accepted to continue with her postgrad (in Safety, Health and Environment) in UTM, the place where we did our degree, suffering in the process by having to climb to the second highest point in campus (the highest point was of course the place known as Balai Cerap - an observatory of sorts which also served as a place people used to go jogging/dating/break rules, etc - we believe we got the second highest point due to the nature of our course and the chances of explosions occurring in our lab. In fact there was one explosion this one time which shook the whole building once, but no one died) and having equally mad lecturers to boot.

And of course she had to mention the lecturers she met again after all these years including the idiosyncratic fabulous four, which made me smile to myself at the thought of how we once concluded way back then that the smarter they (the lecturers) were, the crazier they would be, one of whom was our Academic Adviser (literally translated from Penasihat Akademik) who used to wear trousers that skimmed just slightly above his ankles (with light coloured socks ala Michael Jackson) He'd come to exams with a bag of nuts which he'd be eating from while we feverishly attempted to solve problems of mass and energy that would simply not balance (the subject was known as Mass & Energy Balance, unfortunately) He also once asked some of us if we wanted 'pampers' which was on one of his shelves when we went to get him to sign our 'insert-delete' forms during registration. Why he did that is anyone's guess... Another one of the fabulous four (this one taught us Process Control - something which I use on a daily basis at work now) used to laugh maniacally while standing behind us whenever we had tests in class. It was the most unnerving thing ever. No doubt though there was never a dull moment in class.

I totally admire my friend's guts for doing her postgrad with these people...