UQ Economics tutor Robbie Murray has suffered through a painful first day at the office, as his ECON1010 class remained a frigid dustbowl despite his best efforts to conduct icebreaker activities.

With incredibly naïve optimism, Murray began the 10am tute by asking for a volunteer to stand up and announce their name, degree, and what they did on the holidays. After an uncomfortably long silence, Murray kicked off the exercise himself with a somewhat overprepared account of his various hikes in the Scenic Rim area over the summer.

It was only at this point that Murray began to panic, proceeding to ask a series of increasingly irrelevant questions to nobody in particular, concluding with, ‘so what’s everyone’s favourite emoji?’

Now in a fugue state, he answered his own question with the depressing statement, ‘the poo one,’ broke down in a heap, and mercifully dismissed the class early at 10:20am.

The fourth year Economics/Law student picked up the part time gig ‘for a bit of coin and maybe some clout with the faculty,’ but is already questioning his decision mere days into the semester.

The young academic says he began to lose his mettle when he noticed a first year put his AirPods in midway through his lengthy description of Mount Barney National Park.

‘I have absolutely no authority and these kids can smell it,’ Murray said in an exclusive, perhaps sensual interview with The Obiter.

While there are unlikely to be any friendships formed amongst the students in Murray’s tutorial group, he remains hopeful that he can steer them through the challenges of Playconomics.

We wish him the best. No more to come.