"Why am I here?"

Bear with me on this one;

Last week at school we were getting the studio set up for the session. One of the girls in the course was disappointed to find out that her brand new (Nikon D80) camera didn't have a sync plug for the flash cable. "No problems" said I... We'll just set your cameras' internal flash to trigger the slave on the studio flash, if we turn down the power on your flash to minimum then the light won't affect the image it will just trigger the flash...

Yet another disappointment was in store, the camera flash couldn't be adjusted. So off I went to my bag of gear and pulled out an external flash, set it to manual, reduced the power and sure enough it worked. My comment to the girls (and the instructor) was "why am I here (learning this stuff that I can already do)?" The girls said that I was here to teach them stuff (but I'm a student and I paid to learn stuff not to teach stuff).

The instructor looked at me and asked me a question; "You know what they call people with too much "stuff" don't you?", I wasn't sure so he told me; "a geek!" Well I thought about this for a second and my response was to ask him "which problem that we have had here tonight was I not able to fix?" I'm still waiting for an answer...

Now I'll be the first to admit that I have been known to be a smart arse but this wasn't my intention at all.

What I learned from this is that I am well qualified to be a studio assistant but I'm not yet there with the photography and that is a problem that I'm working on... And that's why I'm there...