Hatemonger Scores Another Hit

As I have posted before, Hatemonger's Quarterly is one of my favorite blogs. He has a great post today, that echoes my own experiences in academia:

Imagine you’re a miserable academic (pardon the redundancy) who works on such important topics as greengrocers in the medieval world or Hungarian breast-feeding. As you have yet to score tenure, you work plenty of hours on all sorts of professorial tasks: organizing lectures; grading papers; researching for unreadable articles; sitting on useless and thankless committees; &c.
As you might well have guessed, you’re not too keen on some of your students—most of them, actually. Despite the purportedly rigorous standards of your purportedly competitive home institution, the average undergraduate at your college is about as motivated as a corpse. And a lazy corpse at that.
Too busy working on making their livers resemble brown bananas, these students simply can’t trouble themselves to do the sorts of things one expects of average undergrads. You know, like attend class, stay awake, make a dent on your homework, study, and not rape anyone.

I can relate to all that. I have had students who would come to class only once per week, or even less. And they didn't see anything wrong with that. The only time they saw a red light was when they got their grades.

Ah, but these kids sure can complain. They spend about five minutes composing their five-page papers the night before they’re due, and thus they read like the work of an illiterate immigrant. But this doesn’t stop them from bitching about their ineluctably lousy grade. If these lowlifes spent half as much time on their work as they did on their kvetching, they might actually earn decent scores. But, of course, they don’t care that much.

How many times have I experienced this!? Students who would have aced the course if they had put as much effort into studying as they did into bitching. I recall one student who got a low grade on a writing assignment because he didn't follow my instructions at all. He emailed me and told me that it was necessary to have at least a 3.0 GPA to become an army officer. He wantedme to "understand that". I emailed him back and asked him if his superiors in the army would want him to follow instructions?

Hatemonger has a great idea:

And this, dear reader, is where our fantastic potential product comes in. We call it the Professor’s Revenge Service, and we’re sure it’ll be bigger in academic circles than Foucault was in the 1980s.
So, what’s the Professor’s Revenge Service, and how does it work? Well, if a particular student drives you bonkers, all you must do is call up the Professor’s Revenge Service and pay our flat-rate fee. We at the service do all the rest.
That is to say, we agree to videotape your horrid student on his first post-graduation day at his first post-graduation job. We’ll send you a high-quality DVD of your former student in action at his new miserable occupation. You’ll take great pleasure as you watch him, in the inimitable words of Tom Lehrer, slide down the razor blade of life.