Word Service

One of Life's Little Lessons

Like all the best urban myths, this one is exactly third hand, and was told to me by someone who had been told it by someone who swears blind that it really happened to him. The chaplain was telling the tale over dinner, in connection with the concern about what is now called Substance Abuse, I suppose. One of the undergraduates was found the previous Saturday night, wandering around the staircase in his boxer shorts and a bemused grin. The narrator, the chap who found him, discovered that our hero was well overlubricated and thought he had just been thrown out of somebody's room. He had gone in to this room and got undressed, but had been ejected by the occupant, and was now unable to discern which room it was; and moreover his clothes and keys were all there so he was unable to go to his own room. They tried some doors along the staircase, only to find the door of our hero's room to be open, with his clothes on the floor by the bed; and there was a part-drunk pint on the bedside table. Pressed for some explanation, our hero was mystified. He said that he had come back from the college bar, got undressed, staggered over to the sink to do the necessary -- only to be startled by being abruptly confronted at very close quarters by this glowering face which had growled `Fuck Off' at him. So he had done that.