1107: The Common Room

When I look back on past experiences, as I am often wont to do, one of the times I look back on most favourably was my time at sixth form. (For Americans, that’s the equivalent of whatever you call 16-18 education, and is optional; those who want to go straight in to work or training or whatever can leave school at 16.)

There are plenty of reasons that sixth form was one of the happier times of my life, most significantly being the fact that all of the dickheads who had made a large proportion of my school life a misery left at 16, never to be seen again. I wasn’t sorry to see them gone, particularly as their non-presence meant that I was left with just people I actually liked.

Our sixth form was based on the same campus as our secondary school, you see — it was part of the school, in fact — which meant that it was a lot smaller than a dedicated sixth form college and thus the sort of environment where it was completely possible to be friends with (or at least know) everyone. This was a pleasant feeling; it brought a sense of comfortable familiarity to the daily grind, and it meant that you were rarely, if ever, thrown into an uncomfortable social situation whereby you were forced to work with people you’d never seen before in your life. (I know some people have no problem with that, but as you probably know if you’ve been reading this a while, I most definitely am not one of them.)

I enjoyed the learning side of sixth form. The teachers were far more informal, willing to let us call them by their first names and, in some cases, confiding in us about students lower down the school that they just didn’t like. (One of our teachers pretty much believed that no-one under the age of 15 had any right to exist in public, and could often be seen tutting and shaking his head out of the window at some particularly rambunctious youngsters. Having spent some time at the chalkface myself, I now understand exactly where he was coming from.)

We learned interesting stuff, too. Learning A-Level Sociology, for example, was a completely different matter to learning GCSE Integrated Humanities, which was basically the same subject. We had hardcore textbooks and we wrote essays that included names and dates in brackets, like proper academics.

A-Level English was great, too — I enjoyed the language side far more than the literature side, I have to say — and we got to study all manner of interesting topics like the way children acquire language, pidgins and patois and even taboo language. There was a certain degree of novelty in being able to get away with writing the word “fuck” in an essay.

I think by far my fondest memories, though, are from the downtime between classes, during free periods and those times when we were avoiding going to the utterly pointless General Studies class. (I got an A in its final exam having attended one lesson out of two years’ worth.) We’d hang out, we’d eat rather poor baguettes from the coffee shop at the recreation centre on the school campus, and we’d mess around with the “brand new” (rather battered, old and crusty) computers that the (actually) brand new sixth form centre had been provided with.

The computers were a source of constant amusement despite the fact that none of them were connected to the Internet. (The Internet was still in its relative infancy in those days, and having a school-wide network for students to use was unheard of.) The gentleman in charge of the computers was a chap called Adrian, who couldn’t have been that much older than us and clearly didn’t know the first thing about computers. He’d often berate us for completely nonsensical misdemeanours, and warn us of bizarre things like the fact that dropping paper down the back of the printer would supposedly make it catch fire. (Uh, no.)

We took great delight at tormenting Adrian at every opportunity. He sort of deserved it, because he was an interfering busybody who regularly got in the way of people actually trying to do useful stuff with the computers, and his overly-superior attitude (and complete lack of ICT knowledge) made him a worthwhile opponent. Consequently, we often engaged in various acts of light cyber-terrorism to mess with him. We’d set passwords on the screensavers, set all the computers to play a full-screen video of a chimp having a wee in its mouth (I think it may have been this one, though obviously this was long before YouTube, meaning someone must have brought it in on a floppy disk or CD — I never knew who) before subtly unplugging the mouse and keyboard, and on one memorable occasion we spent lunchtime making a complete game in Klik & Play called Cock Wars, which featured two crudely-drawn phalluses battling it out for intergalactic spunky supremacy, then left it running on every machine as afternoon classes started.

Our crowning achievement in trolling Adrian had to be what we did on our very last day at sixth form. Someone had discovered how easy it was to pop off the keys on the cheap and nasty computer keyboards that were hooked up to our cheap and nasty keyboards, so we had the bright idea of leaving Adrian a little message on one keyboard, just as our way of saying goodbye. Said message ended up being “BOLLOCKSPANTSHOMOCOCK” where once there had been a normal keyboard layout. You’ll notice there are quite a few letter “O”s in that little sequence; this, of course, meant that we had to borrow keys from a variety of other keyboards, including those from different rooms. Sadly, we never got to see his reaction, and the Instamatic photo we took of the keyboard turned out to be far too blurry to make out the letters. Boo.

I do sort of feel a bit bad, looking back on those days — I know what it’s like to be tormented by teenage charges — but then I remember how irritating Adrian was and how he would completely refuse to listen to someone who actually did know what they were talking about when it came to computers. He was completely unable to listen to reason, and… look, he was just a bit of a dick, all right? You’ll have to take my word on this one; most of you will know I don’t dislike people lightly. Besides, we never did anything that actually damaged the computers; the only incident that would have inconvenienced him at all would have been the keyboard thing.

Anyway, yeah. Sixth form was good times. I miss those days, but they’re a long time ago now.