Give Every Man His Dew

Yesterday I received a flaming email from a good friend. Among other things he called me a lazy so and so. I cannot disagree with his assessment. I have grown lazy during the past 2 years. But I prefer to think that it is; I do what I want to do when I want to do it.

My friend is the chief Librarian at an undisclosed Maryland University. Before that he was a High School teacher. He has dual Masters Degrees (History and English) and a Doctorate in Library Science. In other words, he has spent most of his adult life as a teacher and a professional student. Basically he’s an egghead with a very dry sense of humor.

I facetiously call him Marion the Librarian (A Music Man reference) in our emails.

A mutual female friend once called us the “Odd Couple”. She said I never blinked and he never smiled.

In years past, when I lived in Maryland, he usually bought a bottle of good Irish whiskey for us to share on the celebration of the anniversary of my birth. We would sing (or at least attempt to sing) traditional Irish Folk songs. The true test was singing Johnny McAdoo after 4 pints of Guinness Stout and 6 shots of Tullamore Dew. If we couldn’t sing it, we’d call it a night.


So why did he flame me?

About 10 to 12 weeks ago he sent me a test that he designed for incoming Freshman. It was comprised of 125 multiple guess questions on various subjects. He called it a cultural literacy test. He wanted to use me as a control subject for his test. I felt honored.

Most of the questions were easy to very easy, like Jeopardy for 6th Graders. Some of them had pictures of world famous Landmarks and some had pictures of classic Artwork. I knew the answers to most of the questions without reading the choices. I was stumped on 5 or 6 questions (two were life science questions and another was concerning the metric system conversion), but I made an “educated guess” (I picked the C answer).

I enjoy taking tests and basically I have nothing better to do with my time. However he sent it in an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file. I have an Acrobat Reader which allows me access to the test, but to send him the answers to his questions, I would have to use MS Word. Or worst yet, print it out and send the results by snail mail. Either way this would be a massive pain in the buttocks, so I never sent him the results.

We spoke on the phone last night; I called. I told him of my results of taking his test. Too easy! He agreed saying that the incoming Freshmen that took the test averaged 76% correct. He also told me that he intentionally made the C answer the least correct answer. I told him that if he sent me a bottle of fine Irish sipping whiskey, I would collaborate with him on next year’s test.

The Beach Bum