Jennifer Lam is ready to graduate. She’s done all that Davis has to offer — had a mojito at Bistro 33, pet a Tercero cow, matched with a TA on Tinder and suffered through four years of itchy eyes in the spring. She’s bored, but that’s not what finally got to her.
On April 29, Jennifer lost it. She was sitting in POL 189, taking notes while simultaneously watching The Office on the screen of the guy sitting in front of her (thank God he had the subtitles on) when it happened.
“The professor… oh man this is hard to talk about,” said Lam, who paused during our interview to take a sip of what I can only assume was wine from a Nalgene. “He wrote ‘politics’ on the chalkboard, and then erased it. But he didn’t erase it all the way. Half of the ‘s’ in ‘politics’ was left on the board. I tried so hard to will him to erase it. But he just turned around and kept on lecturing.”
Lam continued sitting in her seat before she stood up abruptly and shouted, “Can you erase that? Erase that right now! The ‘s’, you left the ‘s’!”
“He just stared at me. He didn’t even freaking move,” Lam recounted passionately. “So I went up there, took the piece of chalk from his hairy, weird phalanges and snapped it in half. Then I wiped the ‘s’ off the board with my hand and walked out.”
Lam has since refused to apologize to her professor:
“I could not give less of a heck that I disrupted the class or bruised his ‘ego.’ He was irritating me and I couldn’t handle it for a second more. I will not be saying ‘sorry,’” she said.
The professor, who has requested to remain nameless, had this to say in response:
“It’s like the Bieb’s song, ‘Sorry’ says: ‘Is it too late now to say sorry? ‘Cause I’m missing more than just your body,’ and the answer is it’s never too late to say sorry. I have a PhD and yeah, it stands for ‘pretty huge dic’ — I mean, ‘deal.’ I really don’t care what kind of issues she has: any student should be able to handle reading eight books and writing multiple 12-page papers while managing all of their other classes. My office hours are super convenient: Saturday from 12 to 1:30 a.m. She can come see me any time,” he said.
The professor refused to elaborate on what he meant by the latter half of the Justin Bieber lyric.
ALEX GUZMÁN hates when the chalk board isn’t erased fully, and has been set off on more than one account. You can reach her at almguzman@ucdavis.edu and on Twitter @cactasss.
