The process for gaining access to this industrial work site is mental. Two days of courses, then a multiple-choice quiz and then a practical test: an intervention on a mock-up of the actual equipment. You change out of your clothes and into white overalls, just like in the ‘China Syndrome’ movie.

It’s time for the written test, and we’re fretting because it will be done in a foreign language. The teacher, however, is willing to help us.

Teacher: “I’m going to read the questions and the answers out loud, so pay attention to me.”

And he begins:

Teacher: “Which one of the following is a requirement to access the site? To successfully attend this training course, sounds legit, to possess a union membership card, gosh, I left mine in the other trousers, to be an employee of the National Ministry of Mining and Excavations, but we seem to be in a building and not in a hole in the ground.”

So that’s how it’s gonna be. We relax and joke and carry on.

Teacher: “Don’t you all get the test 100% correct, alright? Otherwise, it will look suspicious.”

Enter [Worker #1], already featured in other stories on this site. He smiles, nods, and proceeds to get each and every single answer wrong, because that’s what the teacher said, right? That you don’t have to get them right. 

He scores maybe five out of a hundred.

Lucky for him, he’s allowed to retake the test and joins us in the afternoon for the practical test. After the initial briefing, we’re corralled in a locker room with big wire baskets full of overalls and shoes.

Everyone picks something in their size and proceeds – on the benches, getting down to underwear, then donning white work clothing, “punching in” the dosimeter badge at the gate, and into the equipment room. 

Meanwhile, an instructor watches over, corrects our behaviour, and rates whether we do the actions in the correct order so that the contamination does not cross between “cold” and “hot” zone.

[Worker #1] is last at first, then definitely late. One of the instructors goes back to the initial locker room and returns with a somewhat embarrassed [Worker #1]. It takes a while to piece together the story, but it turns out that [Worker #1] has chosen just this day to go commando. So, not wanting to disclose his predicament, “smartly”, he waited to be the last one in the locker room before changing, but then he couldn’t figure out to use his badge to open the gate!

The surprising thing is that [Worker #1] still passed the test on that day, and only lost access a few years later, when background checks became stricter.

In France, students can have different attendance statuses. Some are regular day students, while others are “free day students,” meaning they’re allowed to leave campus whenever the teacher in charge of the last period of the day or half-day is absent instead of staying at school.

One Thursday morning, the notice board announced that our math teacher, who was supposed to teach from 11:00 a.m. to noon, was absent. We had been scheduled to take a test, but when a teacher was absent, tests were usually postponed. As free day students, we were happy because it meant we could leave school at 11:00 am and only come back for our afternoon classes at 2:00 p.m.

However, around 10:00 a.m., one of the school supervisors ran into our classmate, Adrian. He told him that our math teacher had decided to keep the test after all. The supervisor himself would supervise it in Room 103, and Adrian was supposed to let the rest of us know.

Adrian never told anyone.

When the test was supposed to begin, Adrian was the only student in the classroom. Meanwhile, all the students who had to stay on campus—such as those eating lunch at school or those who weren’t allowed to leave during free periods—had gone to the supervised study hall, which is where students normally go when a teacher is absent.

At first, they were annoyed with Adrian for not telling anyone. However, the supervisor said, “That’s not like Adrian.”

Until then, Adrian had been a fairly well-behaved student. He wasn’t an outstanding student academically—he was much better at literature than science—but he’d never been in serious trouble. The worst he’d gotten were a few notes home for talking too much in class.

The students who had stayed at school eventually stopped complaining. After all, the test had gone ahead as planned, and they’d already studied for it.

The problem was that all of us free day students, me included, had already gone home.

When we returned that afternoon, we finally found out what had happened. We went straight to the middle school Dean of Students, who said we’d have to discuss it with the math teacher. She also admitted that the situation was surprising because, in her words, “It doesn’t sound like something Adrian would do.”

When our math teacher came back the following Monday, he refused to believe our version of events. Every free day student—including me—received a zero on the test and two hours of detention for skipping class.

The Dean of Students later told us there was nothing she could do. There was no proof that Adrian hadn’t warned us, and Adrian continued insisting that he had.

To make matters worse, some teachers criticized us for becoming more distant from Adrian afterward. But he wasn’t ostracized at all. The students who had stayed on campus kept talking to him as usual, with only two or three exceptions who sided with us.

After that incident, Adrian went back to being the same quiet, well-behaved student he’d always been.

To this day, none of us knows why he acted the way he did that day.

We’re all doing a math test, and we’re allowed to use calculators. The teacher is walking around the room, checking our answers but not really saying anything.

He sighs once, then twice, and after a third time…

Teacher: *Talking from the front of the class.* “Okay, I don’t usually give hints or tell you if you’re wrong halfway through a test, but to all those who have too much blind faith in their calculator, ‘syntax error’ is not the correct answer.”

Cue the sudden sound of pencil answers being furiously scribbled out…

All the students were quietly working on a test when the teacher called out to me:

Teacher: “[My Name], you look very pale. Are you okay?”

I’ve always had an ivory complexion, but perhaps the light was hitting me in such a way that I seemed extra pale.

Everyone turned to look at me, which caused me to blush bright red.

Teacher: “I suppose that’s better.”

I had a college student come to me once after failing a test and had me go over EVERY SINGLE PART of the exam.

Student: “I swear I was gonna study chapters nine and ten but didn’t. If I had studied them, I would have gotten them right. So, can you give me some credit since I would have gotten it right?”

I looked at them for a few seconds.

Me: “Imagine you were injured and needed surgery. Your surgeon was gonna study your specific surgery but didn’t… but they were gonna! Happy for them to cut you open?”