wither in the light

Bored amateur minion of evil finds a pile of graded freshman physics homework, pulls out his trusty red pen, and adds some commentary of his own before placing them back in the pile to be returned to the students. Hilarity ensues, as does that looming sense of terror that lodges in the student's nightmares. This terror will stay with them until the day they graduate... at which point it will be replaced by fear that they will be found to be a fraud.



In the peculiar (*cough* redneck *cough*) culture of the university I attended, the engineering students never sayed they got 'screwed' or 'fucked', they said they got 'dicked'. (Fuck, bring on the bizarre Google hits.) Usually this dicking was done by a clueless TA that knew maybe six words of English and even less about the subject material but was talented as motherfucking Zorro when it came to slashing points off our papers. When papers were returned to us it was common to hear someone say "I got dicked a point for that?"

Sometime in my junior year my friend Richard and I spoke of dropping out of engineering to provide much-needed niche-market office supplies. We'd only have one product: a fine, well-balanced red pen. We'd call it the Dictapoint.