yesterday’s amusement

If you’ve taught a certain number of semesters at the university level, you’ve no doubt heard hundreds of the “grandmother died” excuses for missing class or a test (a number of which are probably true). But yesterday my colleague got “my mother died” from a student. She says he looked not the least bit disturbed, and also his girlfriend was there, barely able to suppress a smirk as he spoke. They’re starting to get a bit more adventurous, I guess.

In fact, it sounds almost like he was trying to win a bet. In my younger years I had a friend agree to serve as a character reference for an apartment I wanted to move into. He was teasing me ahead of time that if they asked about my character, he was going to say: “Harman saved my son’s life,” while trying not to burst into laughter. As far as I know he never did it, but perhaps there’s a whole subculture out there of “let’s see if I can keep a straight face while saying X” activities.