The Alternative Oxford English Dictionary
Reality Bites... the moment when you walk into a tutorial for which you've done so little work you're actually thicker than you were last week. Sitting in your room, picking your nose and thinking of words that rhyme with orange, or sitting in your JCR watching 'Bargain Hunt' (some muppet has decided that retro kitchen utensils are a wise investment) has been a wiser use of your time. You've been telling yourself...
True Lies... all week. That is, you've managed to convince yourself that if you're just honest and say you couldn't be bothered then your tutor will smile and say it doesn't matter, here have a Mars bar. In fact this will result in a...
Face/Off... when you're tutor removes the "hey I'm pretty down with the kids, actually I happen to like rap music and sometimes I swear you know" face and gets frighteningly severe and starts to mention your fragile tenure at the college which, frankly you were lucky to get into anyway. This is Oxford for fuck's sake not some scabby polytechnic and we expect certain levels of performance, blah, blah, blah. The best way to deal with this is do a...
Full Monty... the kind of excuse that involves inventing a syndrome that you've had since birth and which is incurable. Allerplergia syndrome is a good one. You'll need to mention things like 'time management' a lot and look really keen. If you can manage tears it would be good. Be warned: this is the sort of thing that only works once, although it should result in less work for a while. You must be prepared for your tutor to bring it up until the end of time but hey, since they revealed that they didn't like rap music after all, who cares what they think?
24th Jan 2002