The Cranky Professor

The Cranky Prof is a tenured (yeah tenure!) professor at a small public college. Why so cranky? She’s been teaching for a long time for “The Man.” And when she says “The Man,” she doesn’t mean it in a good way, like “You’re the man!” She means it in the same way as “The Man is always trying to keep a brother down.”

Likes: Meat, fur, sequins, metallic thread, feathers. Pina coladas and walks in the rain. Smokey and the Bandit.

Mortal enemies? She has several, although they don’t always know it. They also tend to be librarians. There seems to be a lot of evil librarians in academia.

Early in her career, before the crankiness really took root, she was well-liked all over campus and was super active on many campus committees. Everyone thought she was a really great gal. On this campus there was a total bitch of a librarian. She was the epitome of what happens when tenure is abused. For example, the librarian wouldn’t let the Cranky Prof bring her class of 20 to the library to do a research project, for example, because” it used up too much of the library’s resources.” (Translation: it made her work.) Right then, at that moment, The Cranky Prof made that librarian her mortal enemy. This took the form of being purposefully difficult, sarcastic and generally evil to that librarian, but only when no one could overhear them. In public, she was her usual sunny self, so no one would suspect that she even had a dark side. It drove that librarian crazy.

Later enemies included another librarian at a different campus from whom she had the misfortune of borrowing a pen. It was just lying there on a desk, and the cranky prof used it to write down how many copies she made on a log that “The Man” insisted she keep. All of a sudden, with Ninja-like quickness, she materialized behind The Cranky Prof and informed her that next time, she’d prefer if The Cranky Prof allowed the librarian to select the pen for her, because “how you write impacts its future performance.” That librarian is dead now. The Cranky Prof had nothing to do with it, and if you think differently, you can talk to her rabid pack of lawyers.

Her current mortal enemy is Hugo Schwyzer — and he doesn’t even know it. Yet. But he’s already felt her sting. He popped on her radar because he was rated the second hottest professor in the world on RateMyProfessors.com. Trying to determine just how hot you needed to be to hold that title led her to his blog. And that’s when she discovered that he was a blithering idiot who really thought he was a gift to all mankind. It’s funny how those two qualities go together, isn’t it? She set upon a campaign to strip him of his RMP Chili Peppers, because there’s a little-known loophole where if you say a prof is “not hot” they take away a pepper. Students in all of her classes were busy stripping him of peppers, and through the professorial grapevine, she heard he was on the phone complaining to RMP and writing on his blog that the “male rights activists” were after him again, this time attacking him through RMP. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Check out his blathering about RMP here:

http://hugoschwyzer.net/?s=RMP

Click here to read about his thoughts on circumcision (yeah, I know. I wish this were a joke, too):

http://hugoschwyzer.net/category/circumcision/

Feel free to make him your mortal enemy too.