I managed to freak out my course director slightly today with my amazing psychic ability to know where he was despite the fact the room he was in a) was not his office and b) had an opaque door. I had an appointment to see him but when I got to his office he wasn't there. However, the office showed all the signs of recent habitation, so I thought he might have gone to get coffee or to the loo. I looked in the photocopy room just in case, then went to do the human comfort things myself. When I came back to find him still not there, I wandered down the corridor to see if he was in the departmental office, and was greeted by one of my lecturers who was in her room with the door open. She thought I might have mislaid P's office and told me where it was, so I explained how I'd just been there and knew he was nearby. Someone else in her office who I didn't know found the concept of a student actively looking for their teacher absolutely hilarious for some reason, or maybe it's just that he wishes more students had that much common sense.
Failing to find P at that end I returned via his office to find it still devoid of him, so continued down the other end of the corridor to where the lecture rooms and labs are. He was not apparently in any of those rooms. But as I turned round to go back to his office, I caught sight of a Google screen on one of the computers in the research lab through the big window that technically faces the outside. (The building is like two square doughnuts with open centres, so there are lots of windows like this). I found this distracting/amusing, as to the best of my knowledge that computer always has the Google front page displayed – despite the fact that this time there was a research student sitting in front of it with his head in his hands. And then I saw P inside with his back to me talking to another student.
Seeing as he hadn't been in his office at the time I'd arranged to see him, and seeing as he was obviously in demand, I decided to wait outside the door of that room: as there was no way he could get out without going through it, unless he decided to jump out of the window (unrecommended due to location being 6th floor with some weird chimneys/outlets of college heating system below). Is that not more logical than waiting outside his office, considering there are two possible paths from that room to his office (three if you count walking through the undergraduate lab), and there could have been 101 other students wanting to see him strewn along any or all of them?!
Or maybe I am just weird.
Am currently trying to decide whether I am a genius or an idiot. I oscillate between the two positions at a rate of knots, sometimes espousing both positions multiple times within a single minute of a lecture. For some reason, my brain just isn't willing to deal with the intermediate perspective – that I am a person who knows some things but not others. I wish I knew where that all or nothing approach came from.