A Fresh Week Begins

Before my 7:30 class this morning, I stopped by the Campus Safety office to confirm that a security guy would be hanging around outside my classroom for the first 20 minutes or so. (Just in case the frothing at the mouth girl decided to pay an angry visit.) I'd forgotten that one of the kids in my class actually works for Campus Safety. He's an excellent student, funny, laid back, so I motioned him over to ask him about it, with a brief explanation of what happened Wednesday when the circus of crazy came to town. I didn't say who the offending student was, even though he would probably figure it out when the girl (hopefully, please God) would not be in class. The dean had emailed me that the student would not be returning to class, but I was not very trusting.

"Wow," my student said. "Was it the Alabama girl?"

"No," I said.

"Was it the tattooed-up girl?"

"No."

"Was it the girl who always draws pictures and looks drunk?"

"No. But it occurs to me that it's not a good sign that you have so many candidates to choose from."

He asked his supervisor if he could be the one to stand outside the classroom door. "I have to go there anyway," he said.

"No," the supervisor said. "Paul will do it. He's an officer."

OK, I thought. That makes sense.

And it continued to make sense until I saw Paul.

I went to the classroom at 7:20, and I saw the officer outside the building, looking around the parking lot. Now there's a guy who takes his job seriously. He's even checking out the parking lot for suspicious goings-on. I'm impressed.

I went inside to get ready for class, came out into the hallway at 7:27 and there was Paul, very focused on playing with a squeaking door handle a few feet away from my room.

"Hi," I said. "I'm the instructor for the class you came over for."

He looked up into the air, at the ceiling, as though the voice had come from there. Then he finally looked at me, a tilted look of dog-who-has-heard-a-high-pitch crossing his face.

He said "I don't know what we're doing here."

"Oh," I said. "You mean maybe I'm being too cautious?"

"Are we supposed to do something in this building?"

[silence]

I explained things, again.

"What's the student's name?" he asked. I told him. Then as I started to tell him what she looked like, he went back into the fascinating world of the door handle. And never looked up again.

At some point about 55 years ago, Barney Fife bred with an expired box of Shake 'n' Bake, and this is the love child from that coupling.

Luckily, the guy student showed up proudly in full security-polo-shirt regalia, and said "Don't worry. I've got your back. And if I can't handle it, we'll turn the big weight lifter loose on her."

I had decided to give my students a quick heads-up. I told them that one student would not be back in class, but on the very slight chance the student returned, I would dismiss class, and they should leave. "I'm sure we're not in any danger, or I'd have requested a new room, but I'm erring on the side of caution."

This set into motion the whirling around of 18 or so heads, searching for the suspiciously missing person.

"Yeah, good luck with that," I said. "There are so many lame-asses who don't show up you'll never know, will you?"

We then went forward with our discussion of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." I challenged them to think up an equally ridiculous suggestion to solve a current societal problem. Their idea: Make furniture out of illegal immigrants. Specifically, it would take three fat illegals to make a comfortable recliner. Children would be used as footstools.