I arrived in an indoor place that was something like a cross between a coffee shop and a library.  It had white floors, and there were clusters of tables and chairs which gave it a retail feel, but it was also like a library in that the space was partitioned by stacks of books and it had aisles between them.  At first I was at the left end of a particular aisle, and my objective was to find a seat for a school lecture.  I arrived with my grad school buddy’s wife, Mary Turner, and we were perhaps a minute or two late, just gathering from the fact that most of the seats were already occupied by students, and the professor had put something on the projector.  The tables, chairs, and projector– a somewhat makeshift classroom, was set up down at the other end of the aisle, with the seating on the right side of the aisle and the projector on the left.

The projector screen was showing a five-question ‘pop’ quiz, which was basically a list of terms to be defined– stuff from the assigned readings.  My initial focus was on finding a place to sit.  Apparently all of the seats near the projector had been taken, so I squeezed my way through a tight area between the end of the aisle, next to the screen, and the back wall, where it opened up into another small space with extra tables and chairs.  Fortunately I found an open seat there, but I considered it to be somewhat suboptimal for the purpose of enjoying the lecture, because it was off to the side and behind the screen.  So I wouldn’t be able to see the screen; I would just have to listen carefully and take good notes.

The professor, who reminded me of my property law professor in law school, then made a comment about wanting to collect the quizzes.  I hadn’t even started yet, so that put a bit of time pressure on the situation, which I wasn’t too happy about.  I took out my spiral notebook to get a clean sheet of paper, but found that my notebook had several math worksheets stuffed between the pages, which was a bit confusing, since I thought this was more of a humanities class, like history, sociology or political science.  I began tearing along the perforated edges of one of the sheets, but once it was in front of me on the table I noticed that it had already been written on.

So I had to endure yet another delay, to go about getting another sheet, which I did.  By then I was sure that time for the quiz was dwindling and I worried that I would get no credit for it at all; I didn’t think it would heavily weigh against my grade in the class, but who would be happy about having a zero?  I tried to at least get some points for completing the first term, so long as I still had at least a moment.  I remembered from when I arrived that the first term to define was a long compound noun in German, starting with “Putzt” which is from the verb “putzen” and means to clean, brush, or polish, depending on the context.  To know the rest, I’d have to go around the corner to get a better look at the screen.  Or, as I was sitting there considering my strategy of how to get more accomplished in less time, I considered just looking everything up using the Internet on my smartphone.  I seemed to be by myself in the back, and the area was much more dimly lit in contrast to the brightly lit area where I entered, so I thought I might be able to get away with taking a little short-cut in this case.  By then my frustration level was high so I just wanted to be done with it.

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