This guy next to me in the lab keeps jerking his head to the side, trying to crack the bones in his neck. It looks like when Ian does it, except Ian always elicits some terrifying result. This guy's bones aren't cracking at all, and it just looks like a progressed nervous twitch. A word of warning to Ian, you'll just end up looking weird if you keep up with that habit. And you are already weird enough.I showed up to my advanced creative writing class today and found that I had accidentally enrolled in the poetry section. The teacher advised me to go to the English office and I did, and while I was waiting for the secretary to look up the course number, a stocky, angry-looking man walked into the office.
"There is something very wrong with my computer," he announced.
The secretaries looked at him, probably used to the sort of erratic professor thing.
"The mouse does not work," he said, leaning in to raise his voice a little. "I can not get it to shut down."
"You should probably get Fran to look at it," one of the ladies said. Obviously not trained computer professionals. Neither am I, but I considered briefly offering to look at it for the guy anyway. Then I realized that he would probably stab me with a ruler, and said nothing. He turned and muttered away.
I got my class number, meeting time, professor name, schedule number. I was ready to go, and figured I'd go downstairs to say hello to my new professor and find out what work was to be done before next class.
"Where is Professor Avery's office?" I asked.
"Avery?" the lady smiled. "You just missed him."
Oh, hell.
I went to the office to find the stocky man - my new professor - yelling at a thin woman and gesticulating wildly towards the offending computer. He turned to me.
Now, when I'm meeting someone for the first time, I'm pretty shy. And when I'm at work, I try to overcome that shyness with a little professionalism. I smiled apologetically at the computer and began to speak, but he cut me off.
"Who are you," he said. Very quickly, leaning forward again, like he might hit me if I gave an incorrect answer.
I forgot my last name entirely and just managed to tell him that I had accidentally enrolled in the poetry section.
"And you want an override into my class," he said.
"Actually, the secretary said there was one free spot."
This seemed to upset him greatly. He took another step towards me. "You cannot miss another class," he said. It sounded so silly and overthreatening that I laughed. Oh my, was that a mistake.
"I am not joking," he said, his voice rising on joking to make it absolutely clear that he was not, in fact, joking. I considered using the skinny woman as a human shield. "If you miss two more classes I will fail you. Do not miss any more."
"Okay."
He handed me a seventy page packet. "Read this story by next class. Go make a copy of this and bring the original back, I need it."
"Okay."
I ran like a little bitch to the Alphagraphics. I consider myself to be a tough kind of person, but that man's introduction nearly made me lose it. I'm not describing well enough how overbearing of a presence he was.
In short, I am absolutely terrified of the professor in charge of the class I have been looking forward to for two years. This semester will be interesting, if by "interesting" you mean "the semester I spray the campus with bullets, chanting 'Avery, Avery' like a woman posessed."
