HONORS COMMONS – Sources confirmed Wednesday that LSA sophomore Jacob Turner’s recent experience of reading a sent email proved to be one of the greatest emotional traumas of his incredibly sheltered lifetime.
The email was sent by Turner to his philosophy professor, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, late on Tuesday night. When Turner pulled it up by chance between classes on Wednesday, it reportedly triggered an immediate response of absolute, unmitigated terror.
“My first thought was just ‘Oh god, oh god, Control-Z,’” reported Turner, still visibly distressed. As he was re-reading the paragraph where he asked whether “nineteenth-century thinkers and they’re metaphysical philosophies” was a paper-worthy topic, the student’s pupils dilated and he began to sweat profusely.
“I did not just write ‘they’re’ instead of ‘their,’” Turner reportedly uttered, mortified. “What am I? Some sort of illiterate street scum that can’t differentiate a third-person plural possessive from a conjunction of the third-person plural subject pronoun and the present-tense conjugation of ‘to be’?”
“There is no amount of keystrokes that can undo what I’ve done,” added Turner.
The of purpose email in question (subject: “Possible first paper topic? Thoughts??”) was to gain Dr. Lewis’ approval of his essay proposal for an upper-level philosophy course. Upon discovering that he had included an “absolute clusterfuck” of question marks in the subject line, Turner began to hyperventilate, apparently convinced that “this is pretty clearly the end of [Turner’s] academic career.”
“Seriously – three question marks?” exclaimed Turner, referring to the subject line of his “fucking appalling” email. “What am I, the center of the universe? Dr. Lewis probably has kids to feed, books to write, cigars to smoke, and I just barge into his life with three question marks?”
From approximately 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., directly after re-reading the “absolute atrocity of an email” he’d sent, Turner left several frantic posts on internet forums asking how he could “recall, wipe, or otherwise completely obliterate without any trace whatsoever” a recently sent email.
Turner then spent approximately of two hours on the phone with the University’s emergency ITS hotline. When told for reportedly the “eleven millionth time” that it is not possible to unsend sent emails, Turner directed his attention to the enrollment page on Wolverine Access. “There’s no choice – I have to drop the course,” said Turner, muttering hysterically to no one in particular. “Dr. Lewis has already written an ‘F’ next to my name in his gradebook anyway – might as well quit. There’s a pretty long waitlist, and God knows a reckless, completely inconsiderate imbecile like me doesn’t even deserve a spot in Dr. Lewis’ course.”
After confirming his disenrollment, an email notification appeared on Turner’s screen from Dr. Lewis, reading, “yup, i think this will work. c u @ seminar today.”
At press time, Turner had sent another email pleading with Dr. Lewis to let him back in the course, although number of questions marks contained therein is unknown.
Originally published: January 2013
