I was inspired by the sheer awesomeness that is The Ron Thread, so I decided to start a thread about an entirely different sort of character: Professor Blank. There is an actual Professor Blank at my university. What a name! As his name would suggest, he is a man who can get away with anything. Unfortunately, I only have a handful of stories about him, but hopefully ya’ll can add your own Professor Blanks to make it saucy.
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Professor Blank and the Tale of the Approximately Free Parking
Professor Blank used to drive to campus for each day, but rather than pay for a parking space at the nearby faculty garage, he would simply illegally park in front of whatever building he was teaching in, give his lecture, and then drive home. Sure enough, he started receiving parking tickets. This may have deterred an ordinary man, but Professor Blank a crafty son-of-a-bitch. He continued to park in front of his building, but before going inside, he would turn on the emergency flashers and pop the hood.
This worked for a while, but eventually the campus police caught on and started issuing tickets again. Professor Blank refused to pay the fines and refused to park anywhere else, so eventually the cops booted his car. Blank still wouldn’t budge, so eventually they towed his car.
Professor Blank finally goes to the relevant police office and asked how much it would cost to get his car back. “Well, when you add up the tickets, the towing cost, and the storage fees, it amounts to about $700.” Blank’s crafty wheels began to turn. “What happens if I don’t pay the $700?” he asked. The employee explained that his car would then be sold at the next police auction to the highest bidder.
A few weeks later, Professor Blank goes to the police auction and buys his car back for $200.
That’s great! He can use the $500 he saved to pay the bail when they drag him in on the desk warrant for unpaid parking fines they no doubt have already issued. You can’t fight city hall.
I was once a starving college student. Back then you had to pay per permit per car. You’d couldnt get just ONE placard that you could switch between cars. Well, there was a period where I was using multiple cars and those permits were pricey. So, I started getting temporary permits. They were free and good for two weeks. Walk in, fill out a simple form, and there ya go. I did that for 3 or 4 semesters and saved a couple hundred bucks.
A student walks into his final an hour late. It’s a freshman class, so there areseveral hundred students hard at work on it already. The professor hands him the exam, but warns him he’ll get no extra time to work on it. At the end of the time, the late student is still working while the other students hand in their blue books. The professor gives the student one more warning to turn in his test or it won’t be accepted, but the student just goes on working for another forty minutes, while the professor … does something … I can’t remember. Maybe he starts grading papers, or has another class come in … something. Anyway, the student comes to his desk, blue book in hand, and the professor refuses to take it.
“Do you know who am I?” cries the student.
“No, I don’t care who you are,” replies the professor.
“You really don’t have any idea who I am?”
“You could be the son of the university president, and it wouldn’t make any difference to me.”
The student smiles, jams his blue book into the middle of the pile, and walks out.
If you’ve read the Harry Potter series, you know of Professor Binns, the ghost who teaches the History of Magic. Professor Binns had been there forever; he’d just drift into the classroom and start droning on in a monotone, teaching the exact same material he’d taught, exactly the way he’d taught it, for hundreds of years. Remember him?
That’s who I had for two “history of philosophy” classes: Early Greek Philosophy, and Early Modern European Philosophy. Professor Blank would drift in and think out loud in front of us for an hour, then class was over. I skipped one of his classes for a solid month, and when I came back, he was still going over the exact same material as the day I left. I didn’t miss a thing.
Professor Blank is just about to finish his six year term as an associate professor. He has a meeting with the Dean of the college which quickly degenerates into a heated argument. The Dean goes to leave the room, but Blank follows him out, still yelling angrily. Eventually Blank gets so angry that he punches the Dean in the face.
The Dean decided to deal with the issue quietly. Rather than press charges or deal with administrative shenanigans, he decided to simply refuse to give Blank tenure. Here, the Dean made a critical mistake: when explaining his reasons for declining tenure, he claimed that Professor Blank’s research was not adequate.
Unfortunately for the Dean, that simply wasn’t true, and Blank, who was in fact already well-respected within his field, realized that he could use this fact to advantage. He lawyered up and was quickly able to prove that the material he had produced was far more substantial than what is normally demanded of associate professors.
The Dean’s plan to cover up the punching incident backfired horribly. It was made known that he had lied during Blank’s tenure review, and his decision was overruled. Worse, within a few weeks, Blank’s name mysteriously appeared on the Full Professor list, a distinction which usually requires a voting process and the submission of a lengthy portfolio.
It just goes to show: punching people and hoping for the best is always the best strategy.