Dave had handed in a 60 page document on 'Time series Models' a week ago. He was now sitting with his supervisor discussing it.
The conversation was quite long, with little in the way of good comments.
Dave had written
"... any stationary process, under certain conditions,..."
His supervisor spent half an hour or more explaining to him that this did not make sense. It was completely stupid and missed the point entirely. How can it be "any" if it has to have "conditions", it should be "a" not "any".
To add to this, Dave had consistantly writen things like
"...would not..."
This really seemed to get under his supervisors skin. "Would not" is such a weak statement. It spits in the face of hundreds of years worth of statistical research. It should be "does not".
Dave doubted he was really cut out to be an academic. He just didn't care about such petty little things. Having said that, he would not leave here until they called him 'Doc' and he was all the more determined to succeed.
After an hour and a half of verbal abuse, made all the worse because his supervisor kept apologising which ensured Dave that he was probably holding back, Dave felt pretty good.
Despite everything he had been told, this paper had a LOT less comments scribbled over it than his last one so Dave was happy to be headed in the right direction.
Either that, or his supervisor's pen had run out...
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