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That one asshole in your Introduction to Environmental Science class who keeps asking obnoxious questions, talking over everyone else in the class and finishing the tests an hour before everyone else thinks he’s so fucking smart just because he’s your professor.
“I seriously want to kill that dude,” said Patrick Richardson ’14, an environmental science concentrator. “He always hangs out near the front row, asking questions that literally no one understands and that I’m pretty sure no one cares about. It just looks like he’s trying show off how many technical terms he can use in one sentence. Who does he think he’s impressing? The dean of the faculty?”
“Not the way to get laid, my friend, not the way to get laid,” he added.
Aside from asking overly-detailed technical questions, the asshole has been reported to point at people who raise their hand during class in order to elicit answers, frequently post on the class forum and perpetually lack the ability to recognize faces.
“Half the time this asshole isn’t even asking questions. He literally stands up at the whiteboard and lectures the class,” said Henry Dennis ’15, another student in the course. “Yesterday, he had the nerve to point out an error on a slide, literally walk over to the computer and fix it. I bet he thinks he’s so smart just because he’s up for tenure.“
The asshole’s incomparable grasp of the material has allowed him to not only make bad science jokes during class but also finish writing midterms and finals hours before the rest of the class even has access to them. Furthermore, once the exams have officially ended, the asshole is reported to be the first to know the entire class’s grades, including minute details of the curve.
“He’s too smart. He throws off the curve for everyone else in the class,” elaborated Richardson, “because he literally sets the grading standard. If it weren’t for him, everyone would just fail the tests and we’d all get As. But there’s always that one asshole that’s way smarter than everyone else and becomes a professor and sets the average to a B.”
In addition, the asshole can always be found in office hours, sitting in the professor’s leather reclining chair and discussing career paths, grades and current environmental science publications that no socially adept students have time to read.
“He always drops in all this extra work he’s done outside class, like researching and going to conferences. He even has his own website,” Dana Brandon ’13 said. On the topic of his tendency to waste class time with tangential stories, she had this to add: “What a showoff. Sometimes it’s just best to block him out. At least I can take comfort in the fact that he probably never goes out on the weekends, what with his kid and family and all.”
“The TAs love him, too. They fawn over him like he’s some kind of informational messiah,” added Dennis. “Well I’m sorry TAs, we cant all be freakishly smart and obnoxious about it all the time. Also, we can’t pay your salaries, and even if we could, I, for one, would not.”
Although the asshole will inevitably participate in many of your future environmental science classes, Brandon remains hopeful for the future. “He’ll be out of this school soon enough, and then we’ll finally be free,” she said, pausing before continuing. “In thirty years, give or take.”
