CAR vs. OFFICE HOURS, ROUND ONE

SEK is driving CAR up a dangerous hill you no doubt remember at a rate of 70 miles per hour.  He is on his way to office hours.

CAR: YAAAAAAWN!

All of the electricity in CAR disappears and now SEK and SLEEPING CAR are coasting uphill at the speed of impending panic.  SEK depresses the gas pedal and wakes CAR up.

CAR: Did you say something?

SEK: What was that back there?

CAR: What was what back where?

SEK: That yawn and—

CAR: You mean CAR's micronap?  CAR does that now.  Micronaps are cool.

SEK: Micronaps are not co—

CAR: YAAAAAAWN!

All of the electricity in CAR vanishes again and again SEK and SLEEPING CAR are coasting uphill at the speed of impending panic.  SEK depresses the gas pedal and wakes CAR up.  Again.

SEK: You did it again!

CAR: Did what?

SEK: Fell asleep!

CAR: Did not!

SEK: One more word from you and I'm pulling you over!

CAR: But—

SEK: Enough!

SEK pulls CAR over and looks at it sternly.  After a few minutes, SEK reenters CAR and looks at its lying dashboard with a crooked eye.

CAR: You know you're gonna be late for office hours.

SEK: I know that.  Shut up.

CAR: Those kids are gonna think you let them down.

SEK: I KNOW.

CAR: Go ahead.  Turn CAR on.

SEK: I'm not turning you on.

CAR: Just slip your key in CAR's ignition and—

SEK: SHUT UP.

 CAR: You know you wan—

SEK caves to CAR's inappropriately expressed demands and carefully drives to campus.  Once there, he locates a mechanic who can set CAR straight and informs his students that office hours will be delayed until 2 p.m.  It is now 2:30 p.m. and SEK is talking with a MECHANIC.

SEK: I thought you said CAR would be ready by 2 p.m.

MECHANIC: CAR?  No, CAR needed a part, so I had it towed to Riverside.

In the background, unseen by SEK, CAR moves across the stage from right-to-left, emphatically waving goodbye to everbody. 

SEK: You towed CAR to Riverside?

MECHANIC: We thought it'd be more convenient for you, since you live in Corona.

SEK: How am I supposed to get back to class?

MECHANIC: We can call you a cab.

SEK: And what about after class?

MECHANIC: Just get your wife to pick you up.

SEK: But CAR is our only car.

MECHANIC: CAR is your only car?

SEK: CAR is.

MECHANIC: You want I should tow CAR back now?

SEK: Very much so, thank you.

In the background, unseen by SEK, CAR moves across the stage from left-to-right, emphatically waving hello to everybody.

MECHANIC: Here CAR is, good as exactly the same!  Try not to drive CAR up steep incline between now and tomorrow when part from Riverside arrive.

CAR: (to SEK) CAR was gonna go on a field trip!

SEK: Your services were needed elsewhere.

CAR: (despondently) Back to campus then, are we?

SEK shoots CAR a wilting look, and CAR deflates as best as 3 tons of metal can.  SEK returns to office hours late, commits to making up the three lost hours by staying an hour late on Wednesday and Thursday and coming in an hour early on Thursday.  SEK's not sure how CAR will feel about getting to campus at 9 a.m. on Thursday without employing the toll roads, but from the steely look on his face, it seems he really doesn't consider CAR's feelings to be relevant at the moment.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

Why do you care about office hours so much? As far as I can now recall my checkered grad studency, I routinely blew them off. My undergrads considered me to be an angel anyways (yes, that was an actual evaluation comment, weirdly enough), so I figured why bother. Of course, I later abandoned my Ph.D. right after getting my thesis topic approved and went into an entirely different line of work, so maybe that isn't the best recommendation. And of course you're not a grad student any more, you're an instructor -- which as best as I can make out means something like grad school as transmuted through the Anti-Life Equation. (Add totally bogus sense of professional responsibility, remove hope.)

[Professor Coldheart]

I had a '96 Toyota Camry that would do the same thing. Exciting times!

[SEK]

Rich, think of a class like a litter of seven kittens.* One of them will be evil, never to be petted, so you can ignore it. Four of them will respond to general kitten-enticement principles: rubbing behind the eyes, smoothing down their sides, throwing crumbled balls around, etc. But then you have the other two, the first of whom, for whatever reason, loves to flop down and offer you his belly to be rubbed, whereas the second demands you trace a path through the bridge of his nose, between his eyes, and back down his spine. Now, if you tried either of the latter maneuvers on the four who respond to normal stimuli, they'll behave much like their evil sibling. So you have one of two choices: teach to the four who respond normally, ignore all evil kittens, and hope the two unique kittens receive enough affection through conventional means, or provide a forum for both the unique kittens to acquire the attention they deserve, but also for the conventional ones to admit, on the sly as it were, that they like to have their brow-line traced, but never knew any other kitten ever did.

In short, then, office hours are for the benefit of unique kittens and those who don't know how unique they are yet.

*Lest you think this analogy creepy, there's a box of kittens waiting to be adopted next to the food court, and they are adorable, and I stopped to play with them on my way to the office. I'm not going to say that any of them did anything supremely adorable like, hypothetically, successfully use its little paws to gain entry into my jacket pocket -- in which it, hypothetically again, perfectly fit -- I'm just saying I have kittens on the brain for good reason.

[SEK]

For the record, the kitten looked very much like this, which is likely the only reason I resisted. I know this one's kin, and they are bad, bad little people.

[Sisyphus]

Kittens!!!!! You should bring them to your office hours and offer them as prizes to students who show up! Or, alternately, install a hamster wheel type thing in the car and use them as auxiliary power next time CAR takes a nap.

What you really need to do is find some other students/instructors/whatever to carpool with you to campus.

[SEK]

Not many UCI types are thrifty/stupid enough to have moved out to Corona, is the problem. I tried looking on Craigslist and Backpage for a while, then gave up.

As for kittens, there's a reason I had to post that update on my wife's Facebook, because there's no way she'll believe I'm currently kitten-free without adamant, repeated denials.

[alkau]

So, how many kittens do you now have??? Your sister REALLY, REALLY wants a puppy for her birthday and Cam had better have one or else!! She is telling us she will be leaving us 2 dogs when she leaves town in the future.

[Jonathan]

CAR does that now. Micronaps are cool.

Someone has been watching Dr. Who. How far are you in the series?

[SEK]

Everything but tonight's episode, which starts -- my time -- in about an hour. Needless to say, I'm a wee bit excited.

[SEK]

FTR: I'm not only watching it, I'm teaching it. I am become King Dork.

[Sean]

Scott,
Can I ask a totally off topic question? You are the only person I thought would be able to answer this just off the top of your head.

Okay: When the narrator of Jack London's Before Adam claims that his dreams of the past are somehow the product of Weismann-ian "germ plasm" isn't he getting it wrong? Isn't Weismann's whole point that there is no Lamarckian passing-on of acquired characteristics?

[SEK]

London is, in fact, getting it wrong, but characteristically so: he thought the "germplasm" and "somatoplasm" distinction was, um, not so distinct? Which meant that he thought that the germplasm could be modified over time by alterations to the somatoplasm, which is what, if I'd written my dissertation more informally, I would've called "backdoor Lamarckism." A good rule of thumb vis-a-vis London and evolution is that he's an excellent resource for generating a list of the words that evolutionary thinkers of the time used, but that's the extent of his usefulness.

[Sean]

Fabulous. I knew something was wrong, but I thought it was my brain. You know, even Reesman's critical bio "JL's Racial Lives" skims the surface on all this stuff. I say Maximal Diversity should go to press.