I quit

Warning: Rant.

I've been trying to think positively. I've been trying to avoid perfectionism, and making the best of bad/indifferent/good-but-not-perfect jobs. But today I have failed. I was in a lecture today, and could see the boredom creep across the students faces. Tomorrow I can entertain them with an electrostatics exercise.

It's another of those "I'm a fucking clever bastard: sod the fundamental principles, let's get lost in the mathematics" exercise. Expressions pop up from nowhere and in the end some parameters which I don't understand are calculated. There's some random fucking equation which appears from nowhere with the explanation that "a is a geometry parameter (dimension: length), which determines the diameter and position of the [infinitely long] cylinder".

For my whole life I've been using two parameters to determine the position of long cylinders. One for where it is, and one for how thick it is. The toilet roll is 10cm from the cubicle wall and has 5cm diameter. The lead piping is in the library, 2 feet from Miss Scarlett and 1 inch thick. But no! It is possible to put it all in one, apparently. I think it's some kind of scaling thing: a cylinder twice as thick twice as far away looks the same as one once as thick and once as far away. So is a a ratio? No, it has dimensions.

I want to understand things. Engineers seem happy with parameters which describe some unknown length. I'm not. So tomorrow I will stand and try to explain to the students this crap. They'll be bored and become boring engineers. I will fuck off out of here and do god-knows-what, but something different to this shit.