Why are you using your damn laptop at a computer desk?

It’s halfway through exam season and the rigmaroles of revision, deadlines and your impending quarter life crisis are fully taking their toll on every bit of your being. You’re tired, weak and dishevelled, and with the weight of all your other problems breaking your back the last thing you want is to be slogging your bulky laptop and its various cables down to uni.

And who can blame you? You drag yourself into the library, eyes sore and that awful taste of stale coffee now stuck permanently to the roof of your mouth, but you reason to yourself: at least I haven’t had to worry about bringing my laptop today. At least I can come in, quietly sit myself down at a computer screen and crack on with my work, taking full advantage of a larger screen and keyboard not jammed with the crumbs of sadness.

That seems like a reasonable expectation. Except as you emerge from the lift on level four, you’re met not with a plethra of free computers to choose from as you should be.  You’re instead met with a sea of people invading these desks, aimlessly doing Bitesize quiz’s or half arsedly scrolling through lecture Powerpoints as they watch Pretty Little Liars on the laptop screen next to them. Because of these people, there are no now computers left for you.

There’s so much wrong with this

It’s no secret that emotions run high at this time of year. You haven’t had time to wash your hair in over six days and realistically, something like this could push even the most laid back of us to setting ourselves on fire right there and then.

Exam season relies on the sanctity of unwritten rules and etiquette. Using a laptop at a computer desk while you piss around on Netflix is just as offensive and off putting to others as all the other cardinal library sins we so openly shun. Except unlike airing your gammy feet on the sofas or devouring some sort of clammy egg based sandwich of a lunchtime, this is arguably more directly malicious.

Sitting there smugly tapping away at your essay with one and a half eyes on the football game next to you is no doubt what you hope to be a blatant two fingers to the rest of us ketting out about our deadlines. Yes you think to yourself, as long as I look like i’m far enough along with this to be kicking back with some leisurely tv to the side of me, it doesn’t matter that i’m still only on my intro and averaging 48 in practice. As long as everyone else here is just that little bit closer to loosing their shit circa Britney Spears 2007.

The sort of people brazenly using their laptops at computer desks are the same that in primary school bragged every Christmas about the double presents they were going to get because their parents had split up, sharpened the class pencils at both ends and probably pissed in the sandpit a couple of times. Greedy, game-playing, and forever out to make things harder for the rest of us.

Its the sort of work ethic that might be passable at somewhere like Luton or Leeds Beckett, but anywhere else makes you really quite a terrible person.