Do you have a cohort of midterm exams staring you in the face? Are you feeling stressed out? Are you alternatively feeling not stressed out enough? What better way to deal with the myriad of horrible, crippling problems that you must have than to fake your way out of school? Sure, it sounds easy in principle, but without the grim specter of the cross-country running unit in Grade 7 gym class to spurn us all onto greater heights of Munchausen’s Syndrome, how are we university students ever to get out of class? Never fear, for here is a list of the three ways to fake your way out of school!*

The War Resistor Classic

This is one of the more simple of our Get out of Class Schemes©. It involves going to a pawnshop, buying a pistol, and shooting yourself in the foot.

• Pros: No professor is going to hold you to the syllabus when you present him or her with your mangled appendage. Plus, this worked for my dad’s friend when he needed to dodge the draft to Vietnam in the 1970s.
• Cons: The Sisyphean task that is finding ironic, rare Nikes will be further complicated by the missing toe.

The Spanish InFAKEluenza 2.0

This entails logging onto ROSI and clicking the “Declare Flu Absences” button. If you are asking yourself questions like, “Do I need to have the flu to use this?” or “Will I need a doctor’s note to verify my absences?” the answer is “almost certainly not.”

• Pros: It is, as the system currently exists, impossible to verify whether or not you have swine flu. This could allow you to, say, take a strategic break right at midterms and resume classes when you are feeling more refreshed. And when we say, “Refreshed”, we really mean “Back from Burning Man 2010.”
• Cons: We strongly council against using “Swine Flu” as an excuse for non-consecutive absences. You can also be sure that, as soon as you put your name on that list, the RCMP is going to be encasing your house in an enormous plastic bubble, ET style.

The Heene-dinburg

This is a somewhat more elaborate operation than simply blowing off extremities until your professors relent. The Heene-dinburg involves multiple steps.

1. Make an enormous hot air balloon that looks like it has been wrapped in tin foil; also find fake glasses and beard.
2. Bring your homemade dirigible to some kind of social function (box social, def poetry jam, or the auditions line for The Real World) and shout loudly, “Hey everybody! I am now getting into this balloon! I hope that it doesn’t take off of its own volition and render me incapable of completing coursework by the agreed upon deadline!” Faking sincerity in this part is key, because you are actually hoping that the exact opposite happens.
3. This is the most critical step: after having established to all that you are in the balloon, you must stop being in the balloon. †

† The fewer people that know that you are not in the balloon anymore, the better! ‡
‡ This is where the fake glasses and beard come in! Who fits better into a University of Toronto crowd than someone who looks the bastard child of a Miner ‘49er and a Yorkville yuppie? Answer: absolutely nobody.

• Pros: You will divert traffic from the airport, be the centre of a CNN-led national rescue operation, and get out of class for the time that it takes the RCMP to try to recover safely the balloon (i.e. taser it out of the sky.)
• You will be reviled and shunned by all for the rest of your existence, and forced to wander from country to country in exile, surviving on gruel, ditchwater, and despair. Worse still, you might possibly end up on Wife Swap.

* The author of this article claims no liability for any damages, expulsions, or loss of limbs incurred by use of the aforementioned steps.**
** The author of this article claims conversely a 50% royalty for all rewards gained by the use of the aforementioned steps.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Whimsical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.