whatever happened to class?

What, when, and why:

Last week I rolled up to my old stomping ground, to give higher education another go. Kind of.

After twelve years of health problems, I feel like I’m in the last-chance saloon. Like I don’t have much longer to start to have a life. Like I need to have treatment and stuff to get better, sure, but I also need practice at being out in the real world, to the extent that I’m able (which isn’t much right now; but that’s better than nothing.)

So I’m taking a two-hour-a-week class in computer geekery [I'm being deliberately vague on the off-chance I have a stalker, or worse, a fellow student or my teacher reads this] which is something I’ve never done before but it’s in one of the buildings I went to a few times in my disastrous last attempt at university: the library. And it’s a nice library.

But from the get-go, things did not run smoothly.

Where?

I had this confirmation slip with the course details on it, including the room number, which was something like “E402″. So I look on the directory by the lifts, and this room doesn’t seem to exist. I ask at the help desk, “Excuse me, can you tell me where room E204 E402 is, please?” and a young woman with blonde curly hair looks confused, so asks the slightly older man with a beard next to her, “that’s floor 3, isn’t it?” He looks confused.

“Yeah. Yeah! It must be.” As I walk away the woman calls out to me, “It will say ‘Classroom 2′ on the door!” The number ends with 02 so that makes sense. I get the lift up to floor 3. I see Classroom 3. I walk the length of the floor. I see no classroom 2. I’m exhausted now, so I sit down for a bit, read my book (I still have half an hour before my class, so there’s time to kill) and think things over. If classroom 3 is on floor three, then classroom 2 is probably on floor two, I reason. I read some more of my book. Then fifteen minutes before my class starts, I get the lift down to floor two.The quick way just I wrote that implies that it didn’t take long, that the lift didn’t take three or four minutes to ease its way down to me, and that I didn’t have to go up to the top floor and then down to 2.

Do not believe that implication.

Finally I make it to two, and look around, and quickly discover there are no classrooms on two. I look at the directory again, and… there is no classroom 2 anywhere in the building. Only classrooms 3 and 4. (Which I guess made sense when they built the library back in, er, 2008. Were weird numbering systems in vogue that year?)

Seriously, where?

So I go back to the ground floor, intending to ask at the help desk again but not feeling very confident in their knowledge.

I look around for other options. Ha! The porters at the entrance. They have security cameras. They have to know which room is which, right? I wait for them to stop talking to a man who is telling them his life story, about how he’s a retired member of staff so his library card doesn’t work but he’s supposed to be getting a new one ‘cos he’s taking a class here, but he doesn’t have a card for that yet, so…

One of the porters tries to hurry things along. “No problem, I’ll buzz you in.” The man is still trailing off but I catch the porter’s eye and he comes over.

“Hi, I’m looking for room E402, but I can’t find it,” I say.

“Ah. Now is it E402 or F402?” He asks.

I check my slip of paper. E, isn’t it? Yes. “E,” I say.

He runs his finger down a sheet of paper.

“Yep, that’s classroom 3,” he says. It IS?

“It’s a bit confusing at the moment ‘cos they’re changing all the room numbers around,” he says.

How

“Ahhh,” I sigh. Yes. That makes total sense then, to give me and all the other new students, some of whom have ever taken a class here before, the NEW room number, which doesn’t appear on the directory or even the room door. Of course we will be able to psychically divine its location. I get back in the lift — well, first I wait for the lift, and wait, and — then I get back in the lift and go back to floor 3. At least I know where classroom 3 is. There’s just time for me to dash to the loo (nerves) before I walk in the classroom, which apparently everyone else did psychically divine the location of, because it is FULL.

Green about computers? (Geddit? HA.)

In early ’08, I took a two-day course in this same subject (although all I remember of that speed-learning session is the names of key commands — not how to do them or anything useful, just their names) and I was expecting a similar environment this time: two rows of three seats, plenty of space between each computer, free mints in a bowl at each workspace, free pens and paper… I’m brought abruptly down to earth by reality — a stuffy, noisy room containing four circular tables, each one holding eight computers, all of us crammed in together. I almost don’t go in but I take a deep breath and force myself, taking one of the only empty seats, near the front, just to the left of the tutor’s lectern. My senses are on overload.

Who

It’s a year since I tried to go to university and had to drop out because it was too exhausting physically and mentally, and because it made me very ill, and now I feel like my nerves are jangling. I’m not used to leaving the house, to speaking to someone apart from my parents, to being in a learning environment. I’ve never been in a class this big, one where so many of its members seem to already know each other, and are talking and shrieking loudly. The man on my left is talking loudly to the man next to him about how completely easy his work was today and how his boss keeps sending him the most stuyooopid requests via email, requests which are just like, so beneath him.

Across from me, a woman with black hair and red lips shuffles her notepad and pens around, arranging and rearranging them. On the next table is a man who looks at least 80, his computer pulled close to his face. On the table opposite, a man wearing sunglasses and a sullen expression. On the table next to him, a group of women with gray hair, laughing and talking rapidly, old friends. Next to me, a boy with stubble who may be 18, but only just. He presses the “power on” switch on his computer, and I follow his lead.

Some of us know each other, this room, these computers. Some of us know no-one. I feel more out of it than I expected. But I also feel ready, just a little bit ready, to get into it. The room is sweltering but I wrap my cardigan a little tighter around myself, for protection. The tutor claps his hands.

Time to begin.

Images via: 1, 2.