Mister Murphy lives on
through the notorious Murphy’s law. It always rears its ugly head in the most difficult of situations. Pet Peeves of mine
1. The freeway that is normally smooth flowing clogs the only day you left home late.
2. The lane that you just left, after being stuck there for the last 10 minutes suddenly starts moving. The lane you moved to, on the other hand, comes to a complete standstill.
3. The fuel indicator in the vehicle somehow fails to inform you of low levels on Friday morning. It promptly does it on the next Monday morning, when you are busy running to get to work after a lazy weekend.
4. The ipod charge is always the lowest when you get started on a long drive. It somehow miraculously discharged the previous night.
5. When you are already late, all the lights turn red and even the railroad crossings that are open close down.
6. The last $1 you had dreamed to buy to chomp on in a boring class on friday evening is somehow not found in the purse. You then discover it lying on the car seat, it having fallen out of the purse. Darn!
7. The movie that was in your Netflix instant queue for streaming for the last 2 months (that you never got around to) disappears the day you finally make time for it.
8. You simple must sneeze the hardest when the hairstylist asks you to stay still for 5 minutes.
Attenshaan!
As I’m in the final year of my Master’s Degree and am likely done studying for the next 10 years (gosh! I feel old), I was looking back at the various professors I’ve had the (mis)fortune of studying under. ‘Professor’, for some of these cases is really a polite way of saying pro at being a fool and an ass ;) . I’ve had many quirky profs, some outright funny, some astonishingly dumb and some outright evil. I guess this is why they still are in memory.
Pre-University classes - the first year : I started off the first year as everybody else does. Really excited about college and no freaking clue what I was getting into. Considering we had just been freed from oppressive school classrooms, we were understandably rambunctious lot in class. Read totally uncontrollable. In comes this trigonometry teacher. In a 40 minute class she would spend 15 minutes trying to calm us rowdies down, the next 15 trying to recap what she (hadn’t) taught us in the previous session and the last 5 minutes begging us to listen. The trigonometry angles were Olphaa , Baata and Gyaammma. It’s a miracle I even passed this course. Oh and we were really doing a disservice by being rowdies in a center dedicated for nerds. The other 3 classes were being nerdy enough, why could we not follow the herd? Outrageous I tell you!
In the same college was a guy who taught us Sanskrit. A walking advertisement for a misogynist idiot. He would take great pains to tell us why girls had to stay within limits, listen to what men say, not cross social boundaries yada yada yada all the while drooling endlessly and smelling like he just came out of the trash bin. The very thought makes me barf even today. He made Chewbacca look sexy :-|
Second Year Pre university: The exam that makes or breaks your life, the year where you forget to eat and sleep and just study, so much so that you eat and poop subject knowledge. I fell into private tuition trap like the others and the only good thing that came out of it: I swore that I would die before stepping into another tuition class in my life. I met several weird members of the professor species here - the dumb woman who flirted with all boys in the class, the ugly looking horribly smelling man who only checked girls’ notebooks all the while trying to stick himself to them, the guy who learnt every single word in the textbook and recited it heart to heart (going as far to restart at sentence beginning if he used a wrong word). But I think the worst was the owner of the tuition himself who thought of himself as some sort of demigod. If I had a shot each time he said “blaaady” I would be certified drunkard for the next 50 years. He spouted absolute nonsense rules all the while making you feel if you toed the line, the wrath of Zeus’s thunderbolt would be on you. And the scraping of nails on the blackboard, shudder.
Engineering: was decent enough. I was a nerd for the first two years and a total prof heckler for the next two. I got caught reading novels in class, got called out for “changed for the worse”, got caught imitating a lecturer etc etc. There are two that stand out during this phase : One that gave us Indian mythology lessons instead of microprocessors. I really wanted to ask him if it were okay to submit my view of mythology for my term project instead of the micro p device I had to build. No luck.
The other one was super funny and is probably my favorite prof ever. Totally non intrusive , very intelligent and extremely funny. He would make these statements like “Who put the glass door here” after walking straight into a glass partition in the lab or “Copy in the exam its ok, just make sure I don’t catch you doing it”.
Master’s Degree: Somehow the master’s degree profs in a first world country are the most dinosaur era ones I’ve met. One prof doesn’t let us use computers in class, so hello smartphones ;) Another one insisted I write down every word she puts on board in a notebook. Never mind the words on board were copied verbatim from textbook. She must have mistaken her job for that of a copywriter. Why don’t I also wear pigtails, get a Dora lunch box and suckle my thumb while we are at it?
Any quirky profs you know?
