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True Stereotypes – Funny Stories with an Absent-Minded Professor 1/3

The Cage Laboratory

Thinking it over, the expression “True stereotypes” is almost a pleonasm. A redundance.

If the connection exists, that means a stereotype is almost always true… 

Or is it anything of a surprise in telling you I had a very absent-minded professor? (You might ask me back… Only one?)

Mr. Ştefan (“Ş" reads “Sh”) was the prototype indeed. I’ve studied Physics and he was teaching Electricity^Magnetism stuff. To introduce him to you in this first of my School Stories (actually university ones), let me tell you his unintended “prank” he played to his students.

A group of his students had their weekly Electricity experiments class. I should mention here that all experiments in Optics, Thermodynamics, Spectroscopy and so on were taking place in the building for laboratories on the so-called “floor # two and half”. This name was so weird because the building containing the Physics laboratories was in an extreme wing of the University. (By the way, they were facing the park next to the parking place I am telling you here in the next funny true story about this professor.)

The Laboratory building had been built after the main building, and for some reason their floor levels didn’t match each other. Thus, in order to come from the main University’s building to the Laboratories' one, some stairs were necessary. And since the gate to the laboratories building was between the 2nd and the 3rd floor of the main building... This name, “floor # two and half”, was the only possible.

Well, the laboratory window was pretty far away from the main entrance, but still on the same part with it. Luckily so, because… Wait.

During the class somebody came to announce the professor an urgent personal phone call. He got out the laboratory while the students were still working on their projects. After a short while they heard the keys, which were always stuck in the door’s lock to prevent them from being misplaced, moving in that lock.

They didn’t bother – they should have... Mr Ştefan had forgotten he was in the middle of a laboratory class and that he had students inside, waiting for him. After that personal phone call he just took his keys from the laboratory door, and gone he was.

The students realized some time later that he wouldn’t come anymore, and since the time was up, they wanted to go home.

Of course, door closed... 

Since cell-phones were yet to be invented, they had no other choice than to wait. Bad luck, because their class had been in the afternoon and there was nobody more on the corridors… Two (and half) floors to climb down the street, out of the windows, was also risky. And in the park outside there was nobody walking…

They had to just sit there and wait for a wonder – until later that evening, when the University guardian came to rescue them. He had seen the light on, and wondered whether the light had been forgotten lit, or else who might be there in the laboratory so late in the night…

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