Customer: “You guys need to compensate me.”

Me: “Uh… for what, sir? Did your phone break?”

Customer: “You guys sold me a phone and told me it had privacy features! But my wife was able to guess my password and read all my messages! Now she wants a divorce because she read all the messages I sent to some other dumb b****!”

He sounds like a delight.

Me: “Sir, that sounds… unfortunate. But I don’t understand why we would need to compensate you for that.”

Customer: “I have to get a divorce lawyer so that the b**** doesn’t get all my s***! They’re not cheap, and I wouldn’t need to get one if it wasn’t for your dumb phone!”

Before I can even begin to process this, my “manager” steps in. She’s an older, angry woman.

“Manager”: “No, you wouldn’t need a divorce lawyer if you weren’t a cheating a**hole who was also dumb enough to have an easily guessable passcode. We’re giving you nothing!”

Customer: “You can’t talk to me like that! I’m gonna get my lawyer to sue you, too!”

“Manager”: “You make about as much sense as those ‘share’ buttons on p*rn sites and are about just as useful. I use this specific analogy as those sites will be the only action I figure you’ll be getting for a while. Get the f*** out of our store and go rethink your life.”

The customer swears and shouts some sexist stuff but does eventually leave. The “manager” turns to me.

Me: “Uh… who are you?”

“Manager”: “Oh, just another customer, dear, but I had to step in as I know you’d probably be limited in what you could say to a jerk like that. I just couldn’t hear him say one more thing.” 

I thanked her but advised her that it would probably be best not to impersonate any managers in the future. She said she would happily admit to what she did if anything litigious came our way, but thankfully, nothing did.

I spent a couple of semesters helping my Spanish professor for my college’s work-study program. Among other tasks, I was allowed to grade assignments as long as there were no judgment calls involved. That included essays since this was a low-level class and the essays were only graded on spelling and grammar, not content or style. I was going through a stack of essays when I noticed something odd.

Me: “Hey, [Professor], check out these two essays. Not only are they word-for-word identical, including all the same mistakes—” *and there were a LOT of mistakes* “—but they’re in the same handwriting and the same pink glitter pen. And they must have turned them in at the same time because they’re right next to each other in the stack.”

Professor: “Wow. What were they thinking?”

Me: “I know! So, anyway, should I bother with grading them or do you want to just give them zeroes?”

The school policy at the time was that teachers COULD give a score of zero for any assignment that a student cheated on, not that they had to.

Professor: “We’ll be nice this time. Go ahead and grade one. Then, since that’s how many points they earned between them, divide the grade by two and give them each that.”

I think each student ended up with a grade somewhere in the twenties. It WAS better than getting zeroes… slightly.

I am a Robot Design judge during a First Lego League (now called FLL Challenge) competition. This is a robotics competition for older elementary-schoolers and middle-schoolers. The teams of kids build and program Lego robots to run various challenges on a board for points. While the majority of robots struggle to semi-reliably do one to three of the easiest missions, every year I see a few really amazing robots doing truly impressive feats on the board.

While each team gets two or more adults to aid them, the actual building and programming of the robot are supposed to be done entirely by the kids. Adults are there to give general guidance and keep the kids on task. They can help the kids figure out the missions and how they’re scored, help kids learn how to program, help them figure out why things didn’t work, and maybe provide the occasion small suggestion, but the robots are supposed to be the kids’ work.

Me: “I’d like to talk to someone about the code. Which kids feel like they know the programs best to explain them to me?

Kid #2: “[Kid #1] and his dad did most of it.”

Me: “Okay, [Kid #1], I see you used a My Block. Can you explain how it works?”

“My Blocks” are what they call functions, basically small self-contained bits of code that can be called over and over again by other parts of the code.

Kid #1: “What’s that?”

Me: “This paper here. Can you explain this program?”

Kid #1: “Oh, is that the thing for following lines? Dad wouldn’t let me do that one.”

He turns to one of the coaches who are sitting in the room but have been asked to be quiet while we judge the kids.

Kid #1: “Dad, how does it work?”

Sadly, we had to give the team a failing score on programming due to adults clearly doing the work. “Luckily”, their robot still didn’t follow lines well and ultimately was nothing special — a bit better than the worst robots but not by much. That meant we could still allow them to compete; we knew they would score poorly enough that we wouldn’t need to worry about how to handle a potentially unfair advantage of an adult helping. We try not to punish the kids for the adults misbehaving if we can avoid it; the competition is supposed to be about celebrating their work first and foremost, regardless of how their robot does, not making them feel bad about it.

The extra irony is that very well-written, fully functional line-following programs are easily available online, and so long as you credit your source, you’re allowed to use a program like this. After all, we would hardly be preparing kids for a real programming job if we discouraged code reuse. If the dad had just suggested they look online, they could have legally gotten more reliable code than whatever he wrote.

Still, this is what I love about judging middle-schoolers, they are so shockingly honest. On the occasion that I judge Core Values, which is mostly focused on teamwork, I’ll always ask if the kids worked well as a team, and I’ll always have at least two teams flat-out tell me they didn’t, despite knowing this is the one thing we’re judging them on in that room. Got to love the forthrightness of kids.

Related:
Faith In The Future Of Humanity: Restored!

Being a teacher in 2023, we are having to learn about new ways students might find workarounds to doing homework via A.I. The school’s technology officer has provided a suite of A.I. detection tools that while he claims aren’t foolproof, are usually pretty accurate. Recently, I didn’t need to use this tool for an essay handed in by a student I’ll call Clive. (To those who might comment, I did run the software, and it confirmed my suspicions, but I really didn’t need to in this case.)

It is time for the students to leave school and Clive is being picked up by his mum in her car. She sees me while waiting for Clive, and immediately starts shouting at me.

Clive’s Mum: “Oi! You failed Clive’s history essay! He worked really hard on that!”

Me: “I’m sorry, but he really didn’t. It was shown that he used an A.I. tool to write the essay for him. He essentially admitted as much when I confronted him about it.”

Clive’s Mum: “How can you be so sure! He told me he studied hard!”

Me: “Because, Mrs. Smith, last week Clive couldn’t correctly spell the word ‘Orange’ but he was able to hand in an essay with the correct spelling and usage of ‘Antidisestablishmentarianism.'”

Clive’s Mum: *Pausing for a moment.* “Well, he should still be given points for finding a shortcut!”

Several years ago, back when I was a junior in high school — sixteen or seventeen years old — I started dating a guy who was a grade above me. This was a relationship that I really shouldn’t have said yes to in the first place. There wasn’t really anything BAD exactly, but I’ll admit that I mostly said I’d go out with him just to get him to stop asking me to go out with him.

Anyway, we start dating, and about four or five weeks in, he started asking me to go to a family wedding with him.

Guy: “It’s at the end of September, and it’s going to be down in Olympia.”

Me: “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. We haven’t been dating that long, and I don’t really know your family.”

Guy: “Oh, it’s not a problem. They all want to meet you. And I know seating’s going to be short, but if they run out, I’ll give you my seat and just go stand in the back.”

Me: “Okay, first of all, it’s too early for us to be doing something like that. I don’t really want to meet the rest of your family yet. And second, even if I did decide I wanted to go to this, there is no way you’d be leaving my side.”

He still tried to push a little more and get me to go, but I didn’t budge. As I mentioned, I started dating him for a lot of reasons that really didn’t amount to what dating should be about, even in a high-school relationship. But hey, I was a dumb teenager.

I did end up breaking up with him about three weeks later for several reasons. Things got fun six months after that when he started dating a girl from another school and also tried to ask out one from our school and hide it. Then, he tried to blame me when his girlfriend found out.

I’m so glad I dumped his a** and really sorry I went into the relationship in the first place. At least I got a cautionary tale out of it.