Thanks For The Snooze… And The Shame

When I was in college, I worked for a year on a night clean-up shift from 10:00 pm to 6:00 am in a national beef packing plant. I booked the earliest classes for two semesters, always getting a 7:30 class that nobody wanted. I’d leave the plant and enter the building of my first class and find a room that was unlocked, go over to a far corner, and go to sleep at a desk.

For one semester, the unlocked room was always the same, even though it was not my first class. The room was for a Cost Of Accounting class that I had later in the morning. When students started coming into the Cost class, the commotion would wake me up and I would leave to go to the room of my first class, Auditing. (I was an accounting major.)

One morning, I woke up with the students all assembled at desks and the instructor in his wheelchair at the head of the room. Nothing was being said. I got up from the desk and sheepishly walked in front of the class to the door and exited the room. Embarrassed doesn’t describe the feeling I had as I walked out.

I found out later that the instructor had planned with the students of that class to quietly take their seats and let me sleep for almost fifteen minutes into the class period. He never did it to me again, thank goodness.