You’ll never forget missing your very first college final.
I don’t have the typical excuses for missing that test. I didn’t party too hard, I didn’t oversleep and I didn’t forget.
I was assaulted.
After hours of late-night studying for Honors Western Civ, I took a walk down Highland Road with my study buddies in search of free coffee at Cafe Chi Alpha. After satisfying the coffee urge, we headed back to the dorm for even more cramming. We should have known midnight on Highland Road is not the ideal time for a stroll, but we were freshmen.
Suddenly we saw something rustle in the bushes ahead of us. We disregarded the eerie foreshadowing and walked on. Then, even more suddenly, we were attacked. Pelted. With eggs. From a moving vehicle. Yep, that’s right. We were egged, by some punk boys (we assume).
While it sounds ridiculous, it really hurt. I thought I had been shot, while the egg shells felt like shards of glass to my poor friend.
The most depressing part of the incident was the realization that the attack was a second attempt. That eerie foreshadowing in the bushes? That’s right, it was the first shot.
We made it back to the dorm, truly shaken by the experience, and woke up our roommates in a hysterical frenzy. Once we cleaned up, we knew we couldn’t study any more. We surely couldn’t concentrate on preparing essays on Homer’s Iliad.
So in our pitiful state, we e-mailed our professor, praying for a miracle. The next morning, after little sleep, we were disappointed not to find a reply.
So we went to the final, hoping to talk our way out of the test, but our teacher wasn’t there yet. Because there were three teachers proctoring the exam, we explained our trauma to one of them. She frowned and told us to wait outside. Finally, to our relief, our professor showed up, having read our plea for mercy. She agreed to let us make up the test, and appeared truly concerned for us.
But we were dumbfounded when she asked us if we had filed a police report. The police? We were so embarrassed and upset that we were EGGED, the thought never occurred to us.
After taking the dreaded test, our professor told us (in a roundabout way) we should have sucked it up and taken it the first time. But we were freshmen.
The lesson? Don’t walk down Highland Road at midnight, and if you get egged, call the police.