Cracked: Student Edition

When I first read Cracked, I didn't really get it. What I did get was that it had cartoons and a funny character, Silvester P. Smythe, the janitor of the magazine. It was banned in my house because my parents understood its subversive nature. Up until a couple of months ago, I still had that original stash from my tween days (before there was such a thing as a tween).

Last week, one of my students cracked. He asked me for a letter of recommendation on a Monday at 10:45am. I was driving home from Yosemite, and I never work on Mondays, unless I have to. By 2:45pm, he had written a reminder letter. Two minutes later, he send a mean email to me about a bad grade that I had given him (later we discovered that this email was wrongly sent to me and was intended for another professor). I replied at 6:45pm asking if he wanted me to write him an email after his mean comments. This set off a a raging tirade of emails. He sent a number of emails to the President of "Elephant U," other high level administrators, and some of the faculty. He skipped right over me and our program director and started raging. We now have the director of graduate studies trying to resolve the problem (babysitting him and us). If he would have just been kind to us and told us what we going on, we could have helped. it is too late now. He has set his sights on the guilty parties. I watch carefully at school in case he shows up. If you don't hear from me again, he is likely the culprit.