I just got an email from Virgin Media. The first part I noticed was:
it’ll cost 25p per minute to call from a Virgin home phone, plus 10p to connect.
I immediately thought, “What on earth? Surely they don’t expect customers to stick around with such extortionate call charges.” Then I noticed the context, and realised that it possibly should have read:
it’ll cost 25p per minute to call it from a Virgin home phone, plus 10p to connect.
The actual wording was fine, but the way I started parsing it made me interpret it in completely the wrong way. “It” in the actual wording means “our broadband helpline number”; but initially I parsed it as the dummy subject of an impersonal sentence, so I thought it was saying all calls from a Virgin home phone would have those charges. The altered wording adds an “it” referring to this helpline as the object of the embedded verb phrase, making my interpretation the only sensible one.
In the real world, I did two interesting things today. First, I went to the CS office to pick up my degree results: I was awarded a 2:1. I then went to talk to Dr Berger about applying for an MRes; this I have now finally done, as well as an EST bursary which would require going to Munich for a few months (no downsides there!). I mentioned the result, and he said it was disappointing, because the overall score was about 67%, only a couple of points off a first. Annoyingly, I won’t know for certain what pulled me down for some time because I was only told the overall classification, not marks for each module. Even the average I only know informally, because Uli told me. But the bad marks are apparently on the German side, so as a CS student I’m better than I look on paper.
I've got a feeling my French marks pulled me down badly too. Doing a module like "French Modernity and Narrative" is not a good idea. I screwed up in the coursework as I hadn't done a litterature essay since GCSE, and as a result got 40% for it. I'm not really impressed with my 2.2 and feel a bit thick really.
Ditto that for my Spanish - I just found out this morning I got a 2:1, which although i'm pleased with, i can't help feeling my language skills (or lack of same) pulled me down.