Flashes of Panic

Students are so much fun when they’re up too early in the morning. Take, for example, the one I found pacing outside the crew coach’s office when I went in to swim this morning.

Student: Do you have a pen?
pjm: (looking in swim bag) No, sorry.
Student: Are you a coach?
pjm: No…
Student: (increasingly confused) Are you a student?
pjm: Thanks, no, I graduated years ago.
Student: (gestures at coach’s office) Do you know…
pjm: No. (Putting two and two together, getting four) Are you making up a swim test?
Student: Yes, but…

At that point, the door I’d just come in through opened, and the crew coach arrived, on time for a 7:30 appointment… this student was about to write him a note asking where he’d been, I suppose. I wonder what she’d think of the track coach in my day, who was so routinely thirty minutes late that we spoke of “Banda Time.”

Five minutes later, though, as I came out of the locker room headed for the pool, she was standing outside the women’s locker room, again looking flustered.

Student: Do you know the combination?
Student realizes as the words leave her mouth that the whole point of a combination is that people like me don’t know it.
Student: …oh, of course not.
pjm: Nice try, though.

She passed her swim test, so all is not lost.

Now playing: Radio Free Europe from Murmur by R.E.M.