Interesting Stuff

So… I could use some good stress reduction right about now. There are too many annoying parts of my life at the moment. One of the bigger ones is one of the Systems tutors. This week in lab, we’re writing a dynamic memory allocator, which is fascinating. We have two tutors – Chainmail Chris and Other Chris (I know his last name, but if you don’t know him, I’m not going to give you a bad impression of him). Chainmail is awesome, knows his stuff for the most part, and is a pretty great guy. He answers our questions, and tells us when he doesn’t know the answer. Other Chris is rather different. Here is a summary of an actual conversation that took place Monday:

me: Hey, Chainmail – the way I read this lab, we have to make an allocator with perfect memory utilization that runs faster than the standard UNIX version, in order to get full credit. Is this true? Should that be different somehow?
Chainmail: I’m not a grader, so I don’t know how this lab is graded. The Profs aren’t here tonight, so you should try asking them on Wednesday, or maybe just email them now.
me: OK. Thanks.
Other Chris (walking over, without us asking him for help): You shouldn’t be worrying about how to get points in this assignment; you should be trying to write a memory allocator. Don’t concern yourself with how your work is graded, just code it up, and do a good job, and things will work out ok.
me: Well, how the points are divided up will affect how hard I work on each part of this, so I think this is a very important part of the lab.
Other Chris: You don’t have to worry about how your work will be evaluated.

WTF?! Other Chris also seems to have a habit of staring at us while we’re working, and then inserting himself into our conversation when we pause to think. He doesn’t ask if we need help. He doesn’t even make sure that he’s talking about the same thing we’re working on. He just jumps in, wastes our time, and agravates me. I want to just tell him that no one asked for his help, he’s wasting our time, and I want him to shut up and go away. From now on, I think I’ll have to start sitting as far away from him as possible in the Graphics Lab, so that he might jump into someone else’s discussion instead of ours. If we asked for help, that would be one story, but when we’re happily working along and he comes in, interrupts us, and gets us completely off-track it’s more than just annoying. Argh!