This is all your fault, somehow

I just got this email from an old graduate student, with whom I'd once shared my version of The Most Humiliating Teaching Experience Ever. In my case, I'd been sitting on a table in front of a class of rhetoric students--nagging them, as bad karma would have it, about their appalling papers--when all of a sudden the table leg buckled and the entire table, with me on top of it, went crashing to the floor.

It was like getting a lightning blast from the Gods. And I never nagged a class like that again (well, until last week, anyway, when....well, nevermind).

Anyway, here's what he wrote:

subject: This is all your fault, somehow

Hi,

I fell in class today. I leaned across a table to get a pen and unbeknownst to me, my chair rolled ever-so-slightly away from my legs. I went to sit back down and then I was on my ass on the floor. I was forced to blush and feel humiliated for a while, but I had a moment to think of you when I was looking at the ceiling. The Koreans laughed. Luckily the seat was low to the floor so I didn't have far to go.

I blame you.

--J

Well, it's always nice to know you've made an impact on someone. Even a bruising one!