*The Backdoor is a work of fiction and humor
By Madeleine Fellows
Several students lost their minds Thursday as a result of an innocent professor trying to turn on an overhead projector.
It was an ordinary morning in Intro to Physics when local professor, Dr. Lorenzo Clark, decided to incorporate a YouTube video into his lecture.
“I thought it would be fun,” Clark said in an official statement released Thursday afternoon. “Oh how wrong I was.”
The middle-aged professor arbitrarily pushed buttons on the computer, periodically craning his neck around and squinting at the blank screen. He simply could not “get the darn thing to work.”
“I aged fifty years,” Stephanie Paulson ’22 said.“He was fumbling around up there for so long. I felt my face become wrinkly and haggard like an old crone. I looked at myself in the mirror afterwards. I was unrecognizable. I’m literally an old woman now. Umm … what should I do?”
“I kept thinking, ‘Someone’s gotta go up there and help him out,’” IT employee Deon Lewis ‘21, said. “But then my face started melting off. And here I am now, without a face.”
With 30 seconds left in class, Dr. Clark successfully found the correct button. YouTube was projected onto the screen. Cries of relief echoed throughout the room. However, when Clark made the video fullscreen, he kept the cursor on the play button, so the borders of the video never went away. This only drove his students deeper into madness.
“What really pushed me to the edge was when he wouldn’t move the cursor away,” Bobby Donovan ’21 said. “And that the video had no sound. That’s why I threw myself off the roof of Olin, and why I’m in a full-body cast right now.”
During the incident, Physics minor and Theatre major Riley Hilbert ’19, was pacing back and forth in the front of the room. He reportedly began reciting lines from Hamlet, using another recently-deceased student’s skull.
“I kept my cool as best I could,” Hilbert said. “It didn’t affect me like it did the others. I mean, Professor Clark took so long up there that Rebecca died of natural causes and fully decomposed. She’s just a pile of clothes now.”
Out of a lecture hall of 80 students, 65 sustained minor to severe injuries, all of which were self-inflicted and include eye-gouging, self-scalping, and most horrifically, pants-pooping. A handful of students claim to have lost all their memories. Transfer student Will Yonkers ’20 says he saw his entire life flash before his eyes. Eric Sanderson ’19 was asleep during the incident, yet when he awoke, he had lost the ability to taste food.
Twenty-five students are suing Clark for emotional damages. Ninety percent of his students have dropped out of college altogether. Two of them decided to hit the road and just drive, and never look back. As for Dr. Lorenzo Clark, he faces 15 charges of involuntary manslaughter and is currently being held in a maximum security prison. Let his story be a lesson to all professors everywhere.
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