What Goes Around, Comes Around

Diary Entry: October 16, 2024

Well, today was a thing. A bizarre little piece of performance art that makes me suspect the universe has a much drier sense of humor than I gave it credit for.

My weekend, you see, was a whirlwind of excitement spent wrestling with a textbook and its companion teacher’s manual. Truly riveting stuff. It was the kind of reading that makes you appreciate the structural integrity of your ceiling — a procedural snooze-fest disguised as substantive regulation. I measured my progress in yawns and “brief paroles” to the balcony for a breath of non-recycled air. Despite my Herculean effort to not fall into a micro-coma, I did notice something was off.

As I slogged through the pages, I got the distinct impression the book was taking me for a ride, you know, the way a cabbie treats a tourist by circling the same block three times to run up the meter. The sentences had a familiar ring to them. Not because the material was so profound it demanded re-reading — this is strictly one-and-done literature — but because a low-grade, subconscious fury was brewing. I wasn’t going anywhere. I’ve read this! Why are you telling me this again?

So I did the unthinkable. In a moment of sheer rebellion, I actually flipped backwards. And there it was. I wasn’t reading a textbook; I was reading the instructions for the textbook. It was a lecturer’s guide, complete with prompts for the so-called “Socratic method” — a clever system for ensuring students remain technically conscious during the ordeal.

These manuals are an engineering marvel, really. The goal is to cram the maximum amount of information into the minimum amount of space, which sounds great on paper. The ideal student experience, right? Get in, get the data, get out. The missing feature, however, is the delivery. When a professor adheres to the script, they cease to be human. They become a sort of organic text-to-speech app, and not a very good one. The speech is monotone, the rhythm is off, and the whole thing is just an exercise in transcription. We all sit there, scribbling furiously, not to learn, but to capture the data stream so we can try to make sense of it later. If your attention wavers for a nanosecond, you’re lost. The point he was making two seconds ago is already an artifact from a forgotten civilization. Honestly, you’d get more pathos out of an AI. It could probably do the job with more efficiency and significantly lower overhead.

Which brings me to today’s main event in class. Professor Pigou was, for lack of a better term, glitching. He’d get up, give a little wave, exit through the door to his right, and reappear seconds later from the door to his left. Standard-issue “let’s make this interactive” theater, I thought. We’ve all seen it. But then he did it again. And again. The same wave, the same exit, the same entrance, executed with the terrifying, surgical precision of a cuckoo clock.

After the third or fourth lap, he finally settled back into his chair, looking like he’d just run a marathon in a broom closet. He was a little breathless, his hair had achieved a new level of architectural chaos, his thick glasses were askew, and a small, damp patch had appeared on his shirt, right over his heart.

And that’s when the penny dropped with a loud, ironic clang. The textbook. My weekend reading companion had a printing error. A few pages, duplicated two or three times over.

It seems the software wasn’t the only thing with a copy-paste error. Life, it turns out, imitates artless instructional manuals.