I Was Late to Class

It probably appeared that I was hungover and had slept through my alarm when I arrived at Ecosystem Dynamics and Function class two and a half hours late on Thursday, the 10th of October. But that was not the case. I had stayed in the night before, studying and sipping chamomile tea, getting into bed at a reasonable hour. But I had misinterpreted the class schedule and had somehow accidentally convinced myself that the class meets at 2pm.

Aware that I have a tendency, or maybe even a special, uncanny, talent for experiencing extreme difficulty while trying to do extremely simple tasks, I had already taken measures to prevent something like this from happening. I have my class schedule programmed into a Google Calendar such that it sends updates to my phone with alarms that go off 24hours, 1 hour, and 10 minutes before each class starts. Somehow in the period of time between Wednesday at 9am and Thursday at 10:30am, I failed to notice any of these updates. But by Tuesday afternoon, two days earlier, it was already too late. The delusion that our class meets at 2pm had already cemented itself firmly into my brain.

On Tuesday afternoon I was in a different class. We were planning a group project. My group agreed to meet on Thursday at noon. “Does anyone have any schedule conflicts?” asked one of my group members.

“Ummm,” I thought, recalling, incorrectly, that all my classes meet at 2pm. In fact I have classes on Monday and Tuesday that meet at 2pm. But on Thursday I have Ecosystem Dynamics and Function, known colloquially as EcoDynaFunc, which meets at 9am. “As long as we’re done by 2.” I said. For the next two days I went about my business thinking that as long as our meeting didn’t run late, I’d make it to EcoDynaFunc without a problem.

But at about 10:30 on Thursday morning it suddenly, and for no reason that I can understand, dawned on me that there was in fact a problem; class had started an hour and a half ago at this point and I was in the shower. So I quickly towelled off, dressed, and realized that I hadn’t rinsed the shampoo out of my hair. Next, I jumped on my bike and pedalled frantically to the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation (ECCI) building, where our class normally meets. Finding no trace of our class in ECCI, I carefully combed through the documents I had been given in previous classes, searching for a clue as to where class was meeting at that moment. My fear was that like the previous week, the class had split up into groups and wandered off into the forest, to do fieldwork– a place where I had no hope of finding them.

I gathered from the document that in Week IV, on Thursday the 10th of October, class is to be held in The Crew Building, which is located at The King’s Buildings, a separate campus some 15 minutes’ bike ride away. So I put my helmet back on, which by now had a frothy residue of shampoo and sweat coating the inside of it, and headed toward The King’s Buildings.

I had no luck in my initial search of the classrooms on the first floor, the second floor, or in the basement of the Crew Building, so I went into the bathroom and thought about what other courses of action I could take as I rinsed my head in the sink and tried to clean the shampoo out of my hair with paper towels. At this point it occurred to me that I would probably also miss my meeting with the group from my other class. Our meeting was scheduled for noon that Thursday, and by this time is was close to 11:30. So I got out my phone and started typing an email to the group members explaining that I wouldn’t be able to make it to the meeting.

With my phone out, it occurred to me that maybe I could use my phone to send text messages to people in my elusive EcoDynaFunc class. I had the phone numbers of about 4 classmates, so I texted them, asking where the class was. Then I went back into the bathroom. A few minutes later the shampoo in my hair was slightly less noticeable and I had received a text message!

My classmate’s instructions for how to find the class seemed dubious. Her text indicated that the class was being held in a sort of coffee-break room, but I followed her instructions, and sure enough, behind the coffee-break room is a hidden conference room with a video projector. The professor squinted at me as I silently mouthed the word “sorry” and tip-toed into an available seat.

So as you can see, what appeared to be an incident of irresponsible, possibly drunken laziness was actually a story of courage and perseverance in the face of adversity. My phone, our class schedule, my shower, and even my own brain had all betrayed me on that fateful Thursday morning. But due to sheer strength of will I was able to overcome the odds and arrive at class two and a half hours late and with shampoo still in my hair.