It’s revision season again, and every morning sees a procession of weary, bedraggled first and third years dejectedly dragging themselves to the library to be subjected to another eight hours of dreary book-gazing, enlivened only by the lunchtime Mission trip and the occasional chance to snap at an over-loud fresher daring to whisper something to his friend. You sit there, gazing out of the window at happy second years gambolling carefree on the lawns, and the temptation to aim a judicious hardback right at their heads becomes almost overwhelming.
But this year is different. This year we have FitFinder. Some of you will have read the reports on it, or even the video on the Cherwell website. A few of you will be on it. All of you will acknowledge its utter greatness. FitFinder truly makes revision fun. Oxford’s libraries, hitherto prisons of academic toil, are transformed into show grounds of aesthetic talent. So you’re sitting there, deep in the history of the Peloponnesian Wars, when up pops a message on your screen: ‘Female, Blonde hair. Always in the same chair, why don’t you see me stare, you wear a flower in your hair, please notice that I’m there.’ Naturally, you’re rather curious to find out who this mysterious fittie really is. So you swivel round and check all the desks around you and mentally cross-off all the men, the brunettes, and the non-flower-adorned, until finally you’ve got it down to a shortlist of three possibilities. You’re trying to work out which one it is, and you think, no, can’t be her, she’s a bit tubby, and that other one has a nasty mole on her face, she’s not fit, so it must be that one in the corner, the one with the cute dimple on her chin…and oh God, she’s seen me, quick, I’ll pretend I wasn’t looking. So then you start wondering who it was who noticed her and posted on the website, so you look around and yes, there’s a weird-looking guy a few rows away, and he’s staring at her too, looking very happy with himself, and, oh, why is his right hand under the table?
And then another one pops up on the screen, and you look around for her, and accidentally catch the eyes of a dozen guys doing the same thing at the exact same time, and you all look down at your desks in embarrassment. So you do some work, and after two minutes you’re bored again. Refresh the page, and, damn, ‘male, blond hair, historian wearing blue.’
‘Is that me?’ you wonder, before deciding that it probably is, even though you’re a chemist and your shirt is white.
So now you’re a bit excited, and you flatten down your hair and tuck in your shirt like your mother told you, and look around expectantly for the legions of girls staring deep into your eyes. Only to see to your disappointment that they’re all still ignoring you. So then you start to wonder which girl it was who posted it, and you cross off the ones without laptops, and the ones who are actually working. And then comes the awful realization that the only one left is mole-girl, who is gazing at you out of the corner of her eye with a come-hither expression on her face. Suddenly you’re not so keen on FitFinder after all.
C-Pain Ffpitz
