Stop Me if You've Heard This One

Frequently last spring and summer, a YAB catch-up post would be penned while I sat in the chair of a grad student, listening to a lecture which had little relevance, importance, or even inflection. When I wrote those long, long ago, I felt that I had a justifiable cause to not pay attention. The professor’s yammering was not anything on which I would be graded (since there were no tests and the only deliverables were unrelated papers), nor did I see any future application in whatever career I end up with. And it was this justification that I wrote 2-a-days last summer.

Turns out I had no idea what justifiable cause was.

Looking back, that reason was no more than old-fashioned rationalization. I gave myself a reason to write, nothing more. Why did I come upon this revelation, as I sat in class yet again last night? Easy.

Now I know was justifiable cause is.

Let me explain. I am taking a professor for the second time in two semesters. Last fall, his course was called “International Science and Technology.” This spring, we call is “New Venture Initiation.” For the most part, these are two different topics. One deals with foreign applications and ramifications of have a hi-tech business overseas. The other is a glorified entrepreneurship course. Is there some overlap? Maybe.

Last semester, the course devolved into a speaker series. Maybe my professor was busy, I don’t know. But we had many entertaining speakers, the most interesting being an intellectual property lawyer who had much to say on the world of patents, copyrights, and trade secrets. In fact, it even spawned this post about the Catholic Church hawking Listerine. Hell, I even gave I guy a name: Litigious McLawyerson.

Guess who’s back?

I went into class last night well aware that we were having an IPR lawyer. However, McLawyerson was not the listed guest on the syllabus. It was another guy. But as I sat down in class, unpacked my notebook, and got ready for a relaxing 2 hours of trademark talk, I realized the speaker loading his PowerPoint looked remarkably familiar.

MCLAWYERSON.

Now knowing that it would be impolite to repack and leave, I realized I had been tricked. I was the only student in the class that was in the last semester class, and this presentation was IDENTICAL to the one I had heard just three months earlier. Screwed, with no way to voice my annoyance. Or is there?

Déjà vu, anyone?

When I was 12, we went to Colonial Williamsburg on a family vacation. The first day, my mom and my sister blew us off to attend some “American Girls” tea party with the writer of those books, leaving my dad, myself, and Dr.Bisignano to roam wild in the village of CW. One of our stops was at the shop of the “Cooper” (that’s Colonialese for “barrel-maker.”) The re-enactor had mastered a killer West Indies accent, to make the tourists think that he had come from the Caribbean (which was often the case in that era.) At the end of his talk, he asks the crowd where they think he’s from. After guessing every major island chain in the Sea, he finally lets on he’s from Arkansas.

So when my mom and sister rejoined us the next day, and revisited the same cooper, I found myself at 12 years old in the very same situation I have encountered with McLawyerson. When the cooper finished his talk and asked about his own origins, legend has it that I didn’t even hesitate when I declared, “ARKANSAS.”

So when McLawyerson asked any question last night that he was certain no one would know the answer, you better believe I answered EVERY last one. Why? Easy.

Spite.