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Creases in the cotton shirt stretched across the back of teaching assistant Henry Jervis quickly became soaked with sweat Tuesday, when the 29-year-old doctoral candidate noticed a glaring grammatical error on a PowerPoint slide he had prepared for Professor of American Civilization Jacqueline Herney's afternoon class.
"When it rains, it pours," Jervis observed. "Tropical Storm Jervis made landfall at about 2 p.m. My seventh slide showed up on the screen and I saw that in my haste to shower up and get to class, I had left modifiers and participles dangling all over it."
Jervis added that attempts to dry his salty, wet palms by pressing them against his yellow legal pad were fruitless. While his unclear subjects and predicates remained visible to the entire class of AMCV1020: "Farmville, Smallville and Melville," nothing could be done to calm Jervis' nerves or stop the torrential flow of stinky perspiration they prompted.
"Students around me were whispering, and my heart dropped when I thought I heard them talking about my slide," Jervis said. "Luckily, they were just remarking on the sound that a drop of my sweat made when it fell into my coffee cup."
By the time Jervis' next lecture slide appeared, few students had noted his error. In contrast, all had felt the palpable humidity radiating from the TA's desk in the back corner of the room.
"I had been trying to stay focused and copy down what was projected onto the screen, but my pencil kept slipping out of my hand," remarked Jordan Roy '12.
He continued, "Of course, I'd dealt with sweaty TAs before - who hasn't? - but when I turned around to see a guy whose copy of "Moby Dick" was literally beginning to dissolve back into pulp, I knew I was dealing with something unprecedented."
Even Herney found it difficult to maintain her focus when Jervis peeled off his shoes and began discreetly wringing out his socks under his desk.
"For a single TA to produce that much moisture, you would have guessed he'd spelled 'come' with a 'u,'" she said. "A good graduate student knows how to cope with minor errors in the lecture material - with plenty of AXE Body Spray and a terrycloth hand towel."
Jervis has been sweating in substantial amounts since puberty, but he reported no prior grammatical slip-up had ever managed to so thoroughly soak his undershirt, forehead and reading materials.
"Before that, I could expect an embarrassing misspelling to evoke some slight dampness - I'd resemble an athlete coming back from a quick jog," Jervis said. "Now I worry that future subject-verb disagreements will leave me looking like an overweight drug kingpin trying to outrun RoboCop under the scorching Tijuana sun."
As the semester goes on, Jervis will make an effort to prepare lecture slides earlier, more carefully and less sweatily.
"You can expect me to go through every line with a comb that is both fine-toothed and bone-dry," he said. "And you can bet that this event will inspire me as I write my dissertation: 'Sweat and Tears: The Chris Farley-fication of the American Teaching Assistant.'"
