Anyone who has mentioned graduation to me will have heard my description of it as “three hours of boredom punctuated by a moment of excitement”. (I didn’t make that up; it’s a paraphrase of the quote about war: “long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror”.) I guess I attend it anyway because it serves as a useful psychological “marker” that the degree is over. If I didn’t go, I think I’d have a huge sense of anticlimax.

(The fact that I go may also have something to do with my parents being on staff and thus able to sit on the stage and put the hood over my head; also something to do with my grandmother’s demand for photographs.)

On this coming Wednesday (the 12th) I will graduate from UCT with a BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics. I will receive the degree with distinctions in Computer Science and Mathematics, and with a distinction in the degree overall; I will also be on the Dean’s Merit List. My final marks for this year are:

It actually feels quite weird, to have finally reached this point. For the last three years, I’ve worked away at my courses, but I’ve never really had a feeling that I was actually approaching an endpoint. Now, suddenly, it hits me: I have finished my undergraduate studies. Wow. It’s actually quite a big deal.

Of course, I’m returning to UCT for Honours next year, so it’s not as if what I do with my day is actually going to significantly change (although I will have a much heavier workload). But still. Wow. In a week’s time I’ll be able to style myself Mr. Adrian Frith, B.Sc. (Cape Town). (Although it would be rather pretentious to do that outside of a formal academic setting.)

On the way to UCT from Pinelands, I was on Raapenberg Road where it joins Klipfontein Road. (OpenStreetMap plug: here). I was the first in the queue, stopped at the lights and waiting to turn right onto Klipfontein. Because the lights at Liesbeeck Parkway (here) were out, the traffic was really clogged up. Indeed, when the lights changed to green for me, there was no space to turn into on Klipfontein Road because the whole intersection was full of cars going straight on Klipfontein that had entered the intersection without being able to clear it. So, naturally, I didn’t move into the intersection because I was waiting for some space to appear to turn into.

This, apparently, was not good enough for the idiot in the Mercedes behind me, who was clearly in too much of a hurry to actually think. He decided that if I wasn’t going to go, he was going to just pull around me and enter the intersection. When he did this, of course, there was absolutely no space for him to go, so he ended up stopping in the middle of the intersection.

Now, of course, the lights change, and Mr Merc is blocking both lanes of traffic going the other way on Klipfontein. And, as is the way of such things, a space didn’t open for him until the lights were about to change back again – and enough space opened up that I could go across as well, ending up right behind him. So, ultimately, for the sake of getting exactly one car ahead, he blocked two lanes of traffic for a whole traffic light cycle.

Hmm. Maybe a diagram would explain things more clearly:

(click for full version)

What is even more disturbing is that the traffic turning left from Klipfontein onto Raapenberg (left lane of yellow cars in the diagram) get a green arrow when the light would otherwise be red for them. So, by pulling out into the opposite lane, Mr Merc could quite easily have hit an oncoming turning car; and if he had they would no doubt have crashed into me.

These are they:

Furthermore, I got on the Dean’s Merit List (which means, essentially, that I have the normal number of course credits, passed all my courses this year, am repeating nothing, and got over 70% average). And I got an FSA (don’t know what it stands for), the largest possible academic merit scholarship, for next year.