After one of you signed my guestbook asking to know who Abigail was, I went searching in my archives to the entry in which I explained how I'd come to know her. I found the entry where she should of been mentioned, but there was no mention of her! I'm extremely confused. I must of accidentally deleted quite a few paragraphs of that entry, as I've missed out the entire interview process I had with Brian.
So, for both your benefit and indeed mine it seems, here's what should of been included in this entry. The only explanation I have is that because this entry was written two days after I went for my interview with Brian, I must of just forgotten to write about it and carried on with current events rather than those in the past.
10.07.04
On Thursday (and remember, we're talking about 8th June here) I went for my interview with Brian in college. It was at 10am. Since my sleeping patterns had been a bit screwed up as of late, it was almost daunting getting up so early, especially since the night before, I hadn't gone to bed till around 3am. Still, I managed to make my way to college and get to the multimedia offices right on 10am.
I saw Brian and told him I was there for my appointment. He looked a little confused. "You're appointments not till 3pm mate", he said. "No, it said 10am on the letter", I said, correcting him. He stood corrected and walked with me to the room next to the office and told me to take a seat while he went to get some sort of standard test I had to do. He was gone for about five minutes.
As I heard him coming back, I heard him talking to what I thought was a teacher, but then I heard him say "Just take a seat in there", and I knew that he meant the room I was in.
In came Brian, along with a girl. "Neil this is Abigail", Brian said, as she sat down two seats away from me. He then spent 15 minutes telling us both what the course involved. I already knew what he was talking about though, but listened anyway. He said that course was three days a week - Tuesday, Thursday and Friday - and that they were all full days. I was very surprised by the fact that it was such a small week. I was kind of hoping it would be five days!
He then gave us both a small interview sheet with five questions on it, basically just asking things like why do I think this course would be good for me and what applications have I used before etc. Fairly straight forward. He then said he'd be back in 15 minutes while he left us to fill in the questions.
As we filled them in, I decided to break the silence by asking, or rather confirmed what Abigail's name was. Just a way to start getting to know her, since she'd be on the course in September and I might as well get to know her now.
I found out that she was 17, had come from 6th form and had been doing a course in art or something like that. She asked me how old I was and when I told her, she was extremely surprised. She thought I was 17 at most. She said that I didn't look 20 at all.
I also found out that she uses DeviantART and MSN a lot so we traded our usernames.
After 15 minutes, Brian came back and took me to another room to conduct my interview. It was very informal though, since he's already known me for the past year. He said that I had already been accepted onto the course and this was just a formality.
He asked me what did I think I had gained from the course I'd just finished. The most important thing, as I told him, was the fact that I'd made some really good friends there. I also told him that I had enjoyed my time working with him.
In response, he said that he was very impressed with the standard of work that I had been producing over the work and that when I gave my presentation of my final major project, when marking me for it, he gave me a distinction for it. I couldn't help but grin at this of course. His opinion, sadly, doesn't actually count for anything in real terms, but it was nice to know that he thought so highly of me. He also said that I will "set the standard for the rest of the class" on his course. What a compliment!
I asked him how many people would be on the course. He said 15. Amazingly, he said that there was a guy coming all the way from Zimbabwe to do the course! How cool is that? Apparantly Brian had conducted the interview via email and now he's coming over here for the course. Ironically, there is also another Zimbabwian who will be on the course who resides in Liverpool anyway. I think it'll be cool for those two to meet each other. In addition, apparantly there will be a disabled person on the course who has trouble speaking and is partially blind. As Brian told me, you'd think that the fact that coming onto a graphic design course when you're partially blind would be a problem, but apparantly, according to Brian, his stuff is excellent so i'm looking forward to seeing it.
Brian did have two points that he wanted to discuss with me moreso than anything else. He expressed his concern over my attendance ratings and I apologised for this. I explained to him that this was because I felt that turning up for Tony's lessons was not doing me any favours, as I already knew what he was teaching and that my attendance would be better in Brian's lessons on this new course because I have so much to learn.
Also, he said he had noticed how reluctant I was to take on someone else's ideas into my own work. I admitted to this and he said that he would work on getting me out of this attitude, as of course, when i'm designing for a client, that client may want numerous changes to my work and I won't have the leisure of simply saying 'no' to them.
Aside from that however, Brian said he was looking forward a lot to having me on the course.
I asked him did he know when I got my results back for my course. He said that as silly as it sounds that I'd be getting them around the same time that I'd be starting his course, rather than say, a month before. He blamed this on Ed and the fact that Ed was so crap. "He really needs to get his act together", he said, regarding Ed.
After that, I went back to the room where Abigail was. I had to do a kind of small essay on reviewing a website, along with the questions I had given the answers to. I asked Brian if I could type the essay out instead and he said yes so I decided to go the library instead. I asked Abigail if she'd like me to wait for her after her interview, since we were both going to the station afterwards and she said yes. So, while she went for her interview, I went to type up the essay. It was generic crap really, but I managed to get a page of said crap typed up and printed off in twenty minutes and then I went back to see Brian to hand it to him. On the way, I saw Abigail leaving. We went back to Brian together. I handed him the essay. He seemed pleased and surprised.
"Wow", he said, "have you just done this now?"
"Yeah"
"Y'see", he said to Abigail, smiling, "This young man is gonna be good".
Oh come on. It's an essay! Nothing impressive about it.
...but it's nice to hear nice things about me when I don't get to hear them that often.
We said goodbye to Brian and he said he looked forward to seeing us in September.
After that, me and Abigail walked down to the station together, talking on the way about various things. She said she still couldn't believe I was 20.
At the station, I said that I was going into town to get some credit for my phone and some headphones so I said goodbye to Abigail and we went our seperate ways.
Got the credit, got the headphones, went home.
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So, there you go, the explanation about Abigail and my course interview that never was is now was. Or something.
