Device Of The Week (2)
It’s term time again at our universities. In my day, indolence and ingenuity were attributes associated with the student population. Here is a story I stumbled across this week which shows that this spirit is still alive and kicking.
Four students, Jamie Stewart, Josh Still, Josh White and Ewen MacKenzie, from the University of the West of Scotland (me, neither) lived opposite each other in Townhead Terrace in Paisley. The problem was that they lived in upstairs flats and it was a bit of a fag to go up and down the stairs to share the essentials of life with each other. The answer was a stroke of genius – erect a pulley system across the road between the windows of their bijou accommodation.
The system they designed deployed a bucket and a pair of strings, a white one along which the bucket travelled and a red one which they pulled. To erect the contraption a student stood in the middle of the road one night and threw one end of the string into an open window where it was caught and secured by another member of the brains trust. The same procedure was followed at the other property and the bucket was attached to the white string. It worked a treat.
Alas, one of their neighbours spotted and photographed the contraption in operation, alerting the Old Bill on the grounds of ‘Elf and Safety, fearing that objects could fall from the bucket and cause injury or damage. The police duly called round and ordered the students to dismantle the contraption. So it is back to trudging up and down stairs for them.
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: health and safety concerns, ingenuity of students, police order dismantling of pulley system, pulley system erected across road, students from University of the West of Scotland, Townhead Terrace in Paisley
