Dodging Class

You have probably noticed (being the clever reader that you are) that this is the Sleepy Professor blog. But you may be wondering, “Why is he sleepy?” Then again, you may have already figured it out: I always stay up way too late. Judgment was never a strong point.

Since I consistently postpone my bedtime, there is only one thing that scares me more than a disgruntled student: teaching an 8:00 class. So you can understand my dismay when I learned that this semester I was given a class with the rather unusual schedule of 3-5 PM Tuesdays and 8-10 AM Thursdays. That's not because Tuesdays are lectures and Thursdays are labs. Nope, they're both exactly the same class format. Just at different times.

I'm sure that every student among my readers (both of you) is wondering why anyone would come up with such a plan. The answer is staring you in the face: the administration detests both students and faculty, and their own late nights are spent trying to invent ways to simultaneously screw both groups. Thus the current diabolically brilliant scheme.

Not to worry, though. The Sleepy Professor was up to this challenge. My first idea was to complain to my boss, who would no doubt immediately move heaven and earth, rescheduling every class in the entire school if necessary, to accommodate my perfectly rational desire to sleep until noon.

Right.

OK, an alternate plan. I'd threaten to quit! That'd show them!

“What about the rent?” asked my lovely and patient wife.

Oh.

Maybe I'd take a student poll. My boss didn't care about my complaints, but surely student satisfaction was high on the list of departmental goals. Wasn't it?

Um, yeah.

Hmmm, this was getting to be a little bit tricky. The bureaucracy wouldn't budge. Maybe I'd have to budge the school instead. I went for a walk to think about it.

Suddenly the ground began to shake. Dust rose into the air as the college's buildings collapsed around me.* And suddenly it hit me like (if you will excuse the expression) a ton of bricks: if the school disappeared, I wouldn't have to get up on Thursday!

And it worked. An unusually destructive 6.3 earthquake devastated the entire city. We all had to go home, classes were canceled, and as of this writing they are still suspended. No 8 AM call for me. I can stay up as late as I want!

Which is a good thing, because now I'm too terrorized to sleep at all.

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*Note: Honesty in the face of an actual disaster compels me to confess that I wasn't really outside and didn't witness any collapsing buildings. The college survived the earthquake with relatively little damage, although as you probably know, central Christchurch was pretty much flattened and hundreds of people died. There's nothing funny about that.