Archive for category: If I Ruled the World

Ah, teachers.  What a delicious love-hate relationship we’ve all had with them.  Some have more hate than love in the relationships.  Care to take a guess as to what end the teacher in this article belongs in?  I’ll give you two guesses, and I’ll only write an article about idiots who purposefully choose the wrong answer to a question for the sake of ‘comedy’ on you if it takes you more than one.

I generally have little problems with a teacher, mostly because deep down I’m quite non-confrontational.  (I know you’re laughing on the inside/out loud right now, but it’s true.)  Even those anal ‘I’m taking your phone if it rings during class’ types in high school never really got to me, mostly because I was very careful to ensure that  my phone was off, or at least on vibrate.  This teacher, however, a college  professor of mine from quite a while back, made quite certain that my blood would boil every time I heard his name from the end of his class onward.

What exactly was the problem, you might ask?  (You should be, because I’m tired of padding this article for length.)  This teacher had a very strict tardy policy.  When I say ‘very strict’ I mean slightly less than ‘pre-Civil War slaveholder’ strict.  The only way I could conceive this could be more strict is with physical punishment or dropping your grade every time you’re late.  Except, you see, nobody was really late to this man’s class.  Because if you didn’t make it in before the class began at exactly 10AM, he locked the door.  And he would not let you in.

Everyone’s late sometimes.  It’s an understandable fact of life that really should be universally understood.  Traffic happens.  Sickness happens.  The fact that your daughter has a mental illness and the bus that picks her up and is the only way to get her to school was late, thus making you behind in class by three minutes.  Think that last one was kind of specific?  That’s because it actually happened.  The man knocked on the door several times, each time the teacher would place a look Satan would be envious of across his face, continue lecturing, and then stop upon the next knocking, a cycle that would repeat itself three times.  He finally answered the door, and went straight on to verbally attacking the man, and only let him in when he realized it was a waste of his precious class time after arguing for five minutes.  The argument that he kept quoting was constantly that the student had ‘signed the agreement’ at the start of the semester.  Ya know.  That thing that everyone had to sign, or not take the oftentimes required class?  That one.

While commenting on my prior articles, several people have pointed out that all of my punishments thus far have been physical (though not really violent) to some degree, and that there’s not a lot of creativity to them.  Retribution, however, comes in many forms, and I refuse to become a one-trick pony.  If I were Ruler of This (Free) World, then I would do something about this man.  Something that requires no violence whatsoever.   Delivering calls as swift as judgment from my gold-plated and jewel encrusted phone*, I would call in a bunch of favors/high directives from various people throughout the region.

The next school day, the teacher would be driving to college as if it were any other day, probably hoping with all of his heart that someone would be late so he could point and laugh at them through the window on the door.  He’d get to the intersection right before the turnoff to the college and… cue headlights.  A police officer would be waiting, wondering why a piece of cardboard had been (coincidentally, I assure you) placed over the man’s license plate.  Cue a long, arduous question-and-answer session, followed by a trip over to the police station with much paperwork to be filled out.  Just enough paperwork (again, coincidentally) that he would be approximately five minutes late for class.

Other various interruptions would await him throughout the week.  Or month.  Or the entire school year for as long as it takes him to understand that sometimes completely random events happen that make you just a few minutes late to an important gathering, and that you should not be punished for it.  Just some of these events might include: fake robbery and hostage situation at the store he was getting breakfast at, fake crash between half-a-dozen big rigs just outside his house, strange misplacement of his keys (hidden in the stuffing of his couch, who’d have guessed!) and if technology has progressed enough, freak Godzilla attack.  Maybe being late for half of his classes the rest of the year would take him off of his high horse.