The Disgusting Paper Caper

By K

- And then it was my turn.

When she uttered that last sentence, it was my jaw's turn to feel unbidden the grave tug of gravity. My eyebrows' turn to arch upwards in a vain attempt to vanish into my receding hairline. My heart's turn to thud in my chest, venom flowing bitter in my veins, anger suffusing my body and my face, turning the latter into some obscure shade of frightened cerise.

Wait. Understand:

I want to get out of this place. Badly. And so I write my final exams, without complaint. I hate it but I do it. But this one, this one took the cake and the frosty icing.

I wrote it, felt bad, sat there for an hour pondering why I waste my emotions on such disgusting things as exam paper-setters' awaited gruesome doom and the grisly demise of all members of their families.

The bell rang. I gave up my paper, prayed to all the Gods I knew to help me to pass in all the exams and I walked out.

And looked into her eyes.

She was smiling. I smiled back.

Wait. Understand:

I wouldn't smile at just any lecturer. But she was intelligent. She could speak flawless English. She drove a Ford Ikon and drove it fast and she drove it well. But she had an ugly face, so that spoils the whole James-Bond-Heroine build-up.

"How did it go?" she asked, still smiling. Probably she thought the paper was a good one.

Oh it was, and I gave it to her. "Bad, ma'am", I said, shaking my head so a forelock tumbled into my eyes. I wiped it back to look at her. One delicately shaped eyebrow was up. "Why?" Her strident tones couldn't hide the surprise.

I told her. "About sixty marks were out of syllabus."

The other eyebrow joined it's mate. "What? Why? Which ones?"

I told her. "One question had the action potential derivation, the cable equation derivation and voltage-frequency converter derivation all in one, and only for ten marks."

The smile withered. I continued. "Another question asked us to derive the Error Correction method using Inhibition techniques and Anti-Hebbian synapses. That's totally out of syllabus. They can't ask us to derive one from the other, they are separate in the texts." Let me explain. This question was like asking you to explain English grammar by defining Sanskrit grammar and then using German vocabulary to relate it to English. When I was done, the smile had vanished from her face.

I went on. "And there was Threshold Sharing Functions, which are not in syllabus, and questions worth two or three marks came for twenty marks and -"

"But how can they do that???" She was aghast, "Shouldn't someone tell them how to set papers?"

I tell you, it warmed the cockles of my heart to hear a lecturer say this. I agreed with her. I said, "I agree with you, ma'am. It was all out of syllabus. It's not fa -"

She interrupted me again. She held up her hand, I stopped. She said, "No, it wasn't out of syllabus..."

"What????" I frowned my incomprehension. And then she said it.

"This is a previous syllabus paper! You've got a paper set for the syllabus that was abolished in 1997!!!"

As I said, it was my turn.

A Bitter End

The circle is complete. The wheel has spun round again.

When first V-Dude and I started this blog, this testament to angst and humour, my first stand-alone article was a bitterness-tinged quasi-play about a farewell gone wrong.

Now, the wheel has spun round. One revolution.

Now it is I who face the farewell. To mark the end of my Engineering. And a phase of my life.

A farewell bittersweet, but a life gone wrong?

Today as I sit, the bitterness is still there, the pain, the sorrow of missed opportunities and too-much-hope. But it is quieter, I am quieter.

More things have disappeared than appeared. More plans have gone down the drain than survived.

College, that entity which some miss, now becomes a large gray area in my memory.

A great man wrote, "What might have been is an abstraction, remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present."

The end is now.

And I write this, with the decision made in my mind, to sit tight, to forget, to forgive.

To begin again.

K.