Sarah was more than a little upset about her professor’s office hours. As a nursing major, she was used to early mornings, but 5:00-7:00 A.M. is ridiculous. In fact, Sarah was beginning to regret that she’d ever taken that hematology elective. It was an evening class, her classmates were dead boring, and Professor Culadra was just… weird.

All this ran through her mind as Sarah descended into the basement of Alumni Hall; she’d never been there before dawn. Sarah was visiting Culadra’s office because of an incident the evening before, the last class. She didn’t have time to grab dinner before class that night, so she stopped by Dave and grabbed a meatball sub and some garlic bread. She’d thought Professor Culadra wouldn’t mind since it was an evening class and Sarah was sitting in the back. In fact, Culadra hadn’t said a word while Sarah was eating the sub- he just continued lecturing about clotting, or something. It wasn’t until Sarah pulled out the garlic bread that he freaked out and started shouting about no food in Gadbois. Weird.

She stopped in front of a door marked “LL:1260, Prof. Culadra.” It was an unrenovated section of Alumni, and the door was closed. For an instant, Sarah feared she’d misread the times on her syllabus, but no, she had triple-checked last night. Sarah knocked softly and heard, “Come in!” Professor Culadra had a soft, melodic accent that Sarah couldn’t place; he was swarthy- black hair and colored skin. She opened the unlocked door and, when invited, took a seat. Culadra asked, “What can I do for you?” Sarah started (she had rehearsed). “I would like to apologize for eating in class yesterday, it was disrespectful. Also… I was wondering if you’d gotten a chance to check out my reflection paper?”

Professor Culadra waved away her apology, “forget about it,” and started rifling through one of his drawers. “Let’s sink our teeth into this,” he said as he pulled out a sheet covered in blood-red ink. “Your paper was a B for blood,” he said with a toothy grin. Sarah laughed at his pun. She was relieved for the B; Chat GPT had helped out on the assignment. 

“One more thing, Professor.”… “If you wouldn’t mind reminding me, how long does the take-home midterm have to be?” 

Culadra said, in that strange accent of his, “There’s no need to be so formal. Call me by my first name. Count. And the midterm should be one page, AH, AH, AH, two pages, AH, AH, AH, three pages AH, AH, AH.” Weird.