Once I'd made it to college, I saw Dave and Stan coming towards me. Dave said he was going home. When I asked why, he said that he'd forgotten his work so there was no point in being in. However, I somehow managed to convince him to stay and tell me more about Vicky.
Vicky? Let's rewind.
Since pretty early on in the course, it's not been a secret that i'm in need of a girlfriend. In all seriousness I've asked people like Jamie, and Dave if they could somehow help me out. More recently, Dave has become my official girl-finder, or something. This was pre-empted by the fact that I was feeling so lonely over Christmas, and I pretty much told him this, when he came online 1st January, and told me that he'd found a new girlfriend. He said that he was going to help me and pass my name around, since he knows quite a few people.
On Tuesday night, when he was online, he said that he'd found someone who said they were interested and that her name was Vicky. Since I was incredibly tired when he told me, I said told him to tell me tomorrow in college.
Fast forward to present again.
According to Dave, he had told Vicky about me, but not much really. He said that I was 19, my name was Neil, that i'm a nice guy, nice looking and that I wasn't bothered about the sex. She said she was interested. He also said that there was another five girls interested in me.
Eh?
I find this hard to believe, especially since none of them have even met me or know what I look like. Nevertheless, he said there are five, though he does exaggerate the facts a lot, as would be proven later in the day.
We waited for Louise, our photography teacher to come unlock the classroom door. Finally, after twenty minutes of waiting, she came. "Oh, am I supposed to be having you's now?", she said surprised. She apologised and let us into the classroom, although it wasn't worth it, since within five minutes of being in there, we had decided that our time would be spent in the studio instead, since me and Jamie hadn't taken pictures of our packaging.
On the way to the studio, Zara showed up and wanted to Louise some pictures. She had two sets and gave one to Louise and one to me to look at. The ones I had where of architecture and your general outside shots. However, I looked over at the ones Louise was holding in her hand and to my surprise, seen a long-legged, slim, attractive girl posing in the shots, wearing nothing but a bra and a thong.
Of course, the pictures that I were looking at were soon put a way, in exchange for looking over Louise's shoulder at what I later found out to be Zara's sister. Damn...she was rather damn nice. Louise put them away, once she knew I was looking and laughed. I explained to Dave and Stan what I'd just seen and they were curious. Once at the studio, Louise and Zara were looking at them again and this time Dave and Stan managed to get a look too. As you would expect, the three of us must of looked like our tongues were hanging out. Looking at 26 pictures of a girl in nothing but underwear. Now that's a good day at college.
Once in the studio, we began setting things up. After a short search, Louise got us the digital camera. However, none of us knew how to work the damn thing. There was so many buttons on it and it weighed a ton. After another search, Louise found the instructions for it - In Italian! After about 20 minutes of me trying to figure out how to work it, I did and set it up on the tripod, and put my box in front of it.
Brian, my multimedia teacher came in after a while and told us that he had a meeting tomorrow and that our lesson was cancelled, meaning we didn't have to come in at all on Thursday. I felt both happy and disappointed about this, because I was hoping to show Dave, Stan and Jamie some Illustrator work I'd done of them. I also felt disappointed because Brian has done this a few times now. He doesn't seem to really care about our lesson and has frequently let us go up to an hour early. It annoys me, but of course, everyone else loves a day off.
Louise told the latecomers that if they had already taken shots of their box that they didn't actually have to be there and so after about an hour, all that was left was me, Jamie, Dave, Stan and a guy I can't remember the name of. Craig, I think. We'll call him Craig for now.
Once I'd set up the camera, Dave and Stan said that they were going to go down to the photography shop to see how much they could get for the two lenses Dave had gotten, which didn't fit his camera, leaving me Jamie and Craig.
Jamie had decided that he was going to take pictures of his box, with his digital camera. I didn't want to do it with his camera, though, since although it's 3 megapixels and has a zoom function, it's still nowhere near as good quality as the college's, which is what I wanted to use. After five minutes, he'd snapped the pictures for his box and was off, leaving me and Craig, who I've hardly talked to.
Then, Louise decided to just leave us. She said she'd be back in 30 minutes.
The lights that are used to light the packaging are called Tungsten lights. When you press the shutter button the camera, the lights go off automatically and the flash comes on for those brief milliseconds. We were using two of them and we couldn't figure out how to set both of them off at the same time. There were three switches on the back of each light. We tried every single combination of the switches to get them to go off at the same time, but to no avail. Craig was confused about what I was doing and I tried to explain it to him, but he didn't really understand what I was trying to say.
I took a few pictures regardless of the lighting problem, but they looked bad. They all had a strong shadow being cast on the left of the box, because there wasn't a second light to compensate for it.
After 30 minutes, Louise came back and I explained the problem to her. She didn't know either. I was confused about what actually made her a photography teacher if she didn't know how to work the lights, or the camera. I asked her, and she said she dealt with the theory side of it more and describing and critiquing photos. Ah.
After more fiddling with the lights, I was ready to admit defeat. Then, as another blow to my photographing, the camera decided to die on me. Low battery. Louise positioned the lighting different to help reduce the shadow, but it still looked crap. She left again, leaving me and Craig to take pictures, once the camera had recharged what little battery power it had left in it.
I decided to give in and forget about it. I just wanted to go home instead. I went to the darkroom where I thought Louise was, helping Zara out with developing photos, but she wasn't there, although Zara was. She had all of her sister's pictures layed out on a table. Of course, I couldn't resist but take a closer look at them for a few minutes. Lovely. As I've mentioned a while ago, Zara is Persian and doesn't know much English, so when I asked her where Louise had gone, she didn't really understand me. However, as I was looking at the pictures, she informed me that her sister had 'English boyfriend Ian'. I don't quite know why she just came out with it, but then that's what she does.
I decided to go the office to find Louise and tell her that I was going home. She had to lock the studio so I couldn't just go.
Once I found her, she locked up the studio. On my way out of it, Dave, Stan and Jamie returned. I told them that I was going home, but instead we went to the darkroom, because Dave wanted to see if Louise could sell his lenses to anyone.
Once in the darkroom, Jamie had a field day when he saw the pictures of Zara's sister. As I've mentioned in the last entry, he is a young Ron Jeremy. He's intent on taking millions of pictures of his girlfriend, Danielle and he's quite pleased with the fact that his digital camera can also record video and play it back on the TV. Yes, Jamie is quite excited and wants to make home made porn.
Jamie decided to play around and steal one or two of Zara's pictures. "I'm just taking these home, Zara", he said, as he walked out of the darkroom, grinning. Zara ran after him. "No!", she said laughing. She managed to get her pictures back from Jamie, but he only done it twice more. I'm sure he'll be getting Danielle to recreate the shots.
He decided to go home after a while, and then Stan did too. Dave said that he wanted to stay for a while so I decided to stay with him, but after 30 minutes of him not actually doing anything, I was wondering why he'd chosen to stay. I managed to convince him to leave instead with me.
On the way to the station, Dave invited me back to his, with the intention of meeting Vicky.
"How far do you live from the station?", I asked him.
"Just round the corner", he replied, "About 10 minutes walk"
I decided to, even if it meant paying even more money on trains.
Once at his station, we began walking. And walking. And walking.
"Dave, this isn't 'round the corner'"
"Is to me"
"You have a strange idea of round the corner. Round the corner means a short walk!"
And so we continued walking, in the wind, which had a horrible chill to it, since he lives near the coast.
We must of walked for at least 30 minutes to his house and I was quite relieved once there.
We sat in the living room for a bit, watching TV. No one else was in. I kind of regretted coming, since I could of been in my bedroom, although admittedly not doing anything more productive than I was now. He asked if I wanted to go play some games instead, which sounded like a good idea.
We went up to his room, which was, well, a mess. I thought mine was bad, but his is worse. My mum always tells me that my room is a mess, but compared to his it's quite clean. It's quite interesting to see how not so different I am to another guy of similar age. It's nice to know that i'm not as outcast as I perhaps think I am. All based on a messy bedroom.
There wasn't particularly anywhere to sit in his room to actually play computer games. Dave sat on the floor so I did too, although I found it pretty uncomfortable, especially after my hand touched the wooden floor and it became lightly coated in crumbs of something.
After playing Medal of Honour for about 40 minutes on the Gamecube, the phone rang and he went to answer it. He said it was work and that they wanted him to come work in the shop, since it was busy, due to the kids just getting out of school. He works in a sweetshop.
"So how were you planning on me actually meeting Vicky?", I asked him, as we walked back to his shop.
"Err...I hadn't thought that far ahead", he replied. "Don't worry, you'll still get to meet her"
"What, today?"
"Yeah. She'll probably come in the shop"
I didn't really have much faith in this, as we walked. We finally got to the shop and Dave went behind the counter, as I sat just next to it.
"Umm...what am I supposed to do while you're serving? I can't just sit here doing nothing", I asked him. I didn't really fancy sitting there for god knows how long doing nothing.
"Err...give us half an hour and I'll walk you back the station", he replied. It was 3:30pm at this point.
I didn't know the way back on my own, since it was quite a fair distance from Dave's, as I'd already found out. His skills of exaggeration are quite astonishing. 10 minutes to Dave is actually 30 to everyone else. So no doubt "Five girls are interested in you" means 1.
It was quite interesting actually, seeing him and his boss (who is also called Dave) serve people. Dave has such a friendly personality. Everyone knows him around by his. Even on the way to his house, people were saying hi to him. In the shop, his attitude towards the customers was really nice.
After a while, three girls came into the shop and talked to Dave at the counter. Two of them I thought were really nice looking. They were in the shop for about 10 minutes.
"What's his name, Dave", one of them said, as they left the shop, referring to me. I turned around. "Neil", I said. "My name's Rachel", she said and then left with her two friends.
Dave came over to me and asked what she'd said. "Just told me her name", I replied. "Two of them were rather nice", I said. He agreed. "You wanna know something?", he asked, "It was one of them who said they were interested, along with Vicky". Of course, I couldn't help but be interested in this.
"Which one?", I asked.
"Ah you're interested now aren't you!"
"Go on, which one?"
"Not telling you, you'll have to wait to find out at the party (which he plans to hold at his, some point in the near future)"
"Nah, go on, just tell me?"
"Nope"
"Alright, well as long as it wasn't the one I didn't like? Was it her?"
"No, it wasn't her"
"Oh well that's fine then. Both of them are nice so it doesn't matter which one"
As it came to 4pm, his boss offered to drive me to the station instead of Dave walking me there. I was thankful for that, as it was getting dark and I don't like being out in the dark, especially somewhere I don't know. I joked with Dave earlier on, about how, if I happened to get jumped by some lads, I could shout out to them 'I know Dave! I know Dave!', and they'd reconsider beating me up.
Dave decided to give Vicky a call to see if she'd come to the shop. He went to the back of the shop, but I could still see him and hear what he was saying. I heard him say to Vicky that there was "someone here to see you", amongst other things. However, at the end of the short call, Dave informed me that she wasn't coming. She had said that she lived too far and couldn't be bothered walking. I asked him how far she lived from the shop, to which he replied he didn't know. He didn't seem to know an awful lot about this girl, stating that she "just comes in the shop a lot". My faith in Dave actually finding someone dwindled more.
Dave's boss was ready to take me to the station after that and shortly before he did, I gave Dave my phonenumber, since he asked for it. Maybe he'll phone me or something if he managed to add another five girls to the number of girls that like me.
I made smalltalk with his boss on the way to the station. He seems like a nice guy. I thanked him for the lift, caught my train, paid even more money for a ticket home and went to bed shortly after 10:30pm and I've slept till around 3:30pm.
How's that for an update?
