You lost what?!

Back in college I had to fill a biology requirement in order to graduate, so I took the academic obvious, "Discovering Nature."

Our professor donned a khaki fishing vest and started off lectures with Far Side comics on the overhead. She is my kind of gal. We learned about bugs, pond vermin and other such interesting need-knows. Usually I sat up front, but by a stroke of pure luck, the day I sat in the back one of the specimens she had brought to show on the projector had escaped.

"Oh, dear, oh dear," she said, looking under tupperwares of slimey creatures and flipping through lecture notes nonchalantly. The front row looked around at each other, at the floor, trying to figure out what she had lost.

"Oh no! Where could it be? You, on the front row, start looking around." By this time, the front row was squirming, and some of the girls looked rather poorly.

Finally, she sighed and said, "Oh well, I've still got one left. Too bad, though, this is the smaller one." With that, she plopped a big, fat leech onto the overhead. "They're not normally hairy, this one escaped halfway down the hall before I caught up to him!"

That's one of my best college memories. And, sadly, I remember stories like this better than I remember any coursework. At least I have a degree to prove I graduated.