26 March 2011 (Saturday) - Gardening, Cheating

Up before 7am this morning, and over brekkie I checked out my blog list. As well as writing this drivel every day, I read over thirty other blogs written by family and friends. Not everyone blogs daily, but most people write something twice a week, and I find it a good way to keep in touch. I was amazed to find from one of these blogs that one of my mates is a budding gardener. I can’t see the attraction myself. I detest gardening. In all honesty, unless you are prepared to spend a lot of time in the garden on a very regular basis, gardening is a *total* waste of time. I've blogged in the past when I’ve helped people reclaim their jungle-like gardens before. We'd spend all day hacking back the overgrowth, only to find that a month later the garden looked as bad as it ever was.

A garden looks OK *if* you've time to spend on it. And that's some time every single day, without fail. Otherwise it reverts to jungle. If anyone has a garden, I have two suggestions as to what might be done with it. Either one can remove all the flower beds and replace them with shingled areas (like my garden), then all it needs is the lawn mowing once a week, and raking the rubbish out of the shingle every so often.

Or one can spend an hour (at least) every day fighting the second law of thermodynamics. Which is fine if you like that sort of thing.

Science tells us that gardening is an ultimately futile pastime.....

To work this morning. Having done weekend and night work on a regular basis for twenty-odd years I gave up the night work a few years ago, and am trying to cut back on the weekend overtime too. I detest working at the weekends. However it was payday two days ago, and whilst there is still some money left, there’s not as much as I’d like. I have two alternatives: spend less or earn more. So overtime it is.

Another way of improving my finances is to do other people’s homework for them. It may come as a surprise to many of my loyal readers, but in my more lucid moments I’m a genius. I have degrees in mathematics and haematology, and post-graduate qualifications in teaching. It turns out that I can use my expertise in my free time. I’ve found a website which caters for people who urgently need an original piece of academic work to be produced in a hurry. I could do that.

This website stresses that they are not in the business of helping students cheat, but rather they provide model answers to essay questions. Their specialty is providing model answers in a hurry.  And they offer a premium service whereby they try to provide these “model answers” within a day or so, so that the cheating student has the essay in time for when it’s due to be handed in.

I’ve produced proper “model answers” before, but in the past I’ve had weeks and months to provide them, because that’s how universities operate. It’s been my experience over the years that the only people who have such short deadlines to produce essay answers are the students. But the website stresses that they aren’t in the business of allowing students to cheat on their homework by charging them over one hundred quid to have an expert write the essay for them. So, with a clear conscience I might just sign up with homework-blagger.com.

If I catch any of my students using this website I might just be able to have them sacked. Or am I being hopelessly naive …?