Today's word is FUCK.

Oh, ffs. If I wasn't stressed enough already, I just managed to hit CTRL-D and completely lose my last entry.

Am stressed out of my tiny little mind. Remember how my unconditional offer turned into a conditional offer? Well, that part wasn't a mistake. Birkbeck Registry want me to have either officially finished or withdrawn from the outstanding-since-2004 MPhil before I can start the new course. (This is different from Birkbeck's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, who don't care either way.) Which would've been fine if I'd known that a couple of months ago when I still had enough time to get the thesis done without KILLING MYSELF.

Basically... I have to reformat and reprint my thesis from 2004. It's ~130 pages and severely mangled by Microsoft Word - get it printed out, hard bound, and submitted to the University of London, otherwise I can't start my new university course ON MONDAY. Problem is, my old computer had a feebly small memory, and even splitting the thesis into four files, I couldn't paste the diagrams into the thesis in ye olde days because it took 15 minutes to print out each page that had a graph on. (And most pages have a graph on.) So I originally formatted it by pasting in the diagrams with glue - but I can't find that copy of the thesis. God knows where it is, we've moved house since I produced it. So to print another copy now, I have to open up the graphing program on the screen, take screenshots as the program is too old and too converted-from-Mac to output standard formats like .jpegs or .gifs, paste them into Photoshop Elements, cut out the crap on the screen, re-save as .wmf files, and import into my Word document. And I have literally megabytes of data and I'm not sure in all cases which files I want to use.

And my gall bladder hurts, and this level of stress DEMANDS CHOCOLATE, which I can't eat due to the PAIN. And I have work-for-money all this week, and argh argh argh.

Parents! Guardians! Idiots!

How flippin' stupid are some parents/guardians? My university course starts on Monday. Therefore, I do not know for certain whether I will be available to teach their kids on Saturday and Sunday, because I have to get myself ready for my own studying on Monday.

Apparently the fact my course doesn't start until Monday means that I should not have anything to do on Saturday or Sunday?! What universe do they live in? I may not be going away to live and study somewhere else, but I still have to sort things out!

I've also had to explain how I do not get half term from university, so while my students get a week or 10 days off in the middle of the term, for me it is the same as any other normal week. Therefore I will have the same amount of my own work to do as for any normal week, and cannot magically make more hours available. (This is why I suggested in August that Mr Two Hours A Day At His House should find himself another tutor, as I certainly can't do it. I'm basically only taking on new students who'll come to me.)

And the worst thing is that a lot of these people are themselves educated to university level and should remember what it's like. Bah.