Potty police

First of all, I'm not here. There's no way that I would be sitting here blogging on the night before a huge final exam. I would never be that irresponsible. Then again, some stories have to be told.

Anyway...

This morning at 8 I had a final exam in a big auditorium. Usually we take exams in our lecture hall where we all sit with one empty seat in between us to discourage cheating. This, however, was not to be a usual exam.

The secretary (or "administrative assistant," for all you politically correct people) of this department has been not-so affectionately known as "The Test Nazi" since our midterm exam. She is so (overly) concerned about the possibility of cheating on the exams that she frantically rounds each row of students covering their scantrons with extra sheets of paper and moving the questions directly into alignment with our bodies so that no glancing peripheral vision from a nearby classmate could possibly give away an answer. She has been known to physically yank baseball caps off of student's heads (because we sometimes hide answers in our hair?) and spend inordinate amounts of time handing out our exams one at a time to us in case someone might try to grab an extra copy from a stack.

Today, no doubt, we were in the auditorium at her request, because the tests were arranged in a pattern such that each student was separated from the next by one entire empty row in one direction, and four empty seats in the other direction. There is a word for that: overkill. Even with all this buffer zoning between each student, the woman was still inexplicably concerned that we were all cheating. She did her usual pacing and evil-eyeing to any student who dared to look up, even at the clock.

Then someone got crazy. A boy in my class raised his hand and asked if he could---(GASP!)--go to the bathroom. (Clearly an attempt at cheating...why else would you ask to go to the bathroom?)

A nearby resident gave the boy the "ok" and the student handed the resident his test on the way out, but no sooner had he taken a step toward the door when the cheater alarm in the secretary's head went off. Her eyes began to glow red as she marched over to him, with a reproving index finger waving in the air, and frantically whispered, "NO!"

She informed the student that using the restroom during the test was strictly forbidden. When the student argued, she said, in a patronizing voice, "Is it an emergency?"

I almost fell out of my chair laughing. What kind of person asks a 25 year old boy if his need to urinate is an "emergency?" Just because he's not 4 years old and doing the potty dance doesn't mean he doesn't have to go. I think he's old enough to decide.

The boy tried to wait, but 20 minutes later he raised his hand and asked to go. Test Nazi made a show of sighing, huffing, puffing, and generally blowing the house down, but reluctantly agreed to let him go--if the student emptied his pockets before going (lest he try to phone a friend from the bathroom stall for answers) and was escorted by a resident.

Off he went--a legal adult being escorted to the bathroom by a 30-something resident. Just add bars on the windows and a few more people with tattoos and you've got a prison, folks. Welcome to the Big House.