I got a message in my pigeon hole today which said;
Isaac (sic), Please come and see me about your OT1A essay. It seems your referencing is less than honest. - [Lecturer's name withheld]
So I rightly completely freaked out. I went to the library and re-borrowed some of my books. I was fairly well packing it. Stressed. Frazzled. Bemused. Because I couldn't work out what the problem would be? Did I have wrong page references? Did I paraphrase without quoting?
I didn't pay attention for two hours in class as I went through my referencing with a fine-tooth comb. Double-checked all the references which I'd copied between my draft document and the final version.
As it turns out, the note was a joke. Not written by the lecturer, but some jester. One, I assume, who is a reader of this blog.
Furthermore, as I did find a couple of extremely minor reference issues, to which I alerted the lecturer via email before we met, had this lecturer been the one who was marking this paper I would have seriously undermined the transparency/anonymity policy of the marking. I am now late to travel to my sister's wedding, and may miss having dinner with my extended family, an opportunity which occurs approximately twice a year.
Dear prankster, thank you for causing me to sin. I have spent the last 5 minutes since speaking to the lecturer (who assured me I can sleep easy), I have spent these minutes calling you all manner of names in my head which are not fit to print on this blog, nor to be spoken in refined company.
You, my friend, are a nincompoop.
--END RANT--
It wasn't me.
ReplyDeleteThat sucks. Hope the wedding/dinner plans work out fine.
ReplyDeleteWe got a bit more traffic than we bargained for, but arrived on time.
ReplyDeleteAnger subsided. Heart-rate returned to normal. Vengeance cancelled.
Phew. I can sleep at night now.
ReplyDeleteJokes, wasn't mwa.
MD.
That isn't a funny joke at all. Funny is when both sides find it funny. With what you went through initially it isn't a funny joke.
ReplyDeleteThey should 'fess up and apologies for a prank gone awry.
It was indeed a prank gone awry. It's like all those bucks night horror stories, that go around. Thank you all for your heartfelt agreement that this wasn't funny.
ReplyDeleteI can see now how someone would think it would be funny, but it missed the mark.
And spare a thought for my darling wife who found the note and almost burst into tears to hear I'd been accused of plagiarism, especially when she knew how much time I'd spent working on the essay.
Man, it sounds like your friends are too serious at college. Because the first thing I would have thought of was that it was a practical joke. Only later would I have started worrying...
ReplyDeleteThat's true. In hindsight it is more clearly a joke. But as with many of these things it was all in the execution and the timing.
ReplyDeleteThe prankster had dated the note, signed the lecturer's name, and I have a particularly friendly rapport with this lecturer, so the informality of the note was reinforced by that relationship.
But the timing was what really did me. First, it was Sarah getting the note from our pigeon-hole and handing it to me gravely. Also, as we were going on holiday, I was saving money on photocopying textbooks by taking photos of the book chapters I need and then reading them off my mac. I also took pictures of the cover and publishing information for referencing. So amongst all these pictures, some page number were missing from shots which I wasn't 100% sure I had then referenced correctly, and it would have been easy for me to associate the wrong pages with the wrong covers. So for example a marker could have gone to check a reference and it didn't exist as I'd got the wrong page with the wrong book.
It was just plausible enough.