Despite being more than halfway through his first year on The Farm, Freshman Joey Bernstein raised his hand during Wednesday’s Psych One lecture to ask professor Jamil Zaki if he could be excused to go to the bathroom. The class ground to a halt and 300 pairs of eyes turned towards him, judgement crashing around the rocky shores of his ignorance.
“I don’t get why everyone was staring at me,” Joey said, “All I wanted was a hall pass. I mean everyone has to pee sometimes, don’t they?”
Although Joey had stumbled upon a profound truth- that everyone must pee sometimes- he nevertheless had failed to pick up on a simpler fact: that nobody asks for permission to pee in college. Joey never was the quickest learner, and his admission to Stanford is rumored to have been the result of a minor bug in the admissions department’s database, but never before had the wide-eyed frosh been so deeply wrong. Indeed, while most of his peers have long since adapted to Stanford by wiping their optimistic grins off their faces, trading in their khakis for sweatpants, and devouring Game of Thrones over problem sets, Joey remains happily naïve to standard University procedures.
His roommate reported, “Yeah, I sit next to Joey in Psych. But don’t tell anyone I know him. All the kid does is takes notes for the whole lecture; he doesn’t even go on CNN.com, let alone Facebook. Hell, I’ll come back from EBF on Wednesdays and find him sitting there doing the class readings for Friday. Jeez, he needs to figure this whole University thing out. What does he think he’s paying for? He may have some serious emotional issues to deal with. He just doesn’t get anything.”
Joey still doesn’t quite understand his error, but remains hopeful that the Spring Quarter will allow him more time to assimilate into Stanford. “I even signed up for some guest speaker programs,” he said. “I just hope I don’t end up needing a drink of water during one of their presentations. If even my Psych lecturer didn’t know where the hall passes are kept, there’s no way the speakers will.”
