Lawless Algorithm

Diary Entry: April 14, 2025

You know, today had one of those moments of cosmic déjà vu that sends you spiraling down the rabbit hole of memory. My professor, who proudly announced that class questions would be handled by a “random algorithm” — for fairness, you see — somehow managed to assign me the very last question of the day, or the most laughably insignificant one, every single time. It’s a special kind of talent. Ah, the beautiful, impartial hand of fate. It’s moments like these that always remind me of the great Steven Austermiller.

What a character. A skinny, beady-eyed chap who first graced Georgia with his presence to help us locals establish quaint little things like “democratic institutions.” I hear he later moved on to perform similar miracles in Ukraine. He loves to mention his extensive network of contacts here, which I’m sure is very true. He’s also the maestro who orchestrated the 2015 National Client Counselling Championship, the one where he so skillfully relieved me of my otherwise inevitable victory. I even wrote about it the moment it happened, a raw, unfiltered masterpiece of disillusionment. This wasn’t just fixing the competition; it was a spectacular display of corruption. He went into the judges’ room and literally worked with them for around 30 minutes to make sure we didn’t win! The man should never be allowed to work with students ever again. What a shameless, lawless person!

It was February 1st, 2015. The official time of death for my ambitions was 39:35.39 on the stopwatch. That’s when we found out my teammate and I had clinched a glorious 3rd place.

The absurdity of it all was the standing ovation we received from literally everyone except the final scoreboard. Our own coach told us we’d soared past his expectations. The opposing team’s coach — who, I should add, only sat in on our session to witness for himself the “complete injustice” of our near-perfect 108/110 score from the first round — pulled me aside to prophesy my brilliant future in the legal field. The actor they hired to play the client, whose whole job was to be difficult, apparently broke character afterward and told the organizers he was rooting for us, that we were the easiest team to work with.

It was a parade of praise. A judge gave us a solemn “good job,” and leaned in to tell me personally, “good legal analysis.” An organizer gushed about how fantastic we were. A staff member from the host university shot us a look of such profound sadness after the winner was announced, as if her puppy had just been run over, and whispered, “You are already the winners.”

And yet, we lost. Which I really didn’t want to do, because everyone from my university was waiting to hear about our triumph. I now had to go back to work, where I’d majestically convinced my boss, Keti, or Ketti, to give me two days off for this grand tournament, and explain that I’d bombed. To add a final, cinematic twist, one of the judges was a partner at my own law firm. So, I didn’t just fail; I failed in front of a key witness.

But our benevolent overseer, Steven, didn’t see it that way. In his enlightened view, we were all winners. This whole thing, he explained with a straight face, was “just for educational purposes.”

Naturally, my teammate, Lasha, made the hilariously naive move of asking to see the evaluation sheets. You know, for educational purposes. Steven, a true champion of institutional transparency, immediately informed us that they were confidential. Of course, they were. The secrets of our education were far too precious to be shared with the students.

So yes, as I wrote down that evening at 18:41, a spectacular amount of monkey business had taken place. Purely for the sake of education, you understand.