I’m at OtherJob, as I tend to be on Saturday nights, and I’m working on finishing the week’s grading, as I also tend to be on Saturday nights.  I have three assignments left: a workbook assignment for one of my seventh grade classes, a workbook assignment for my honors Algebra class, and a mid-chapter quiz for my Algebra class.  They’re stacked together, slightly overlapping, on the counter next to me.  Our counter is bar-style, sorta; there are two– the one that customers touch is higher, and the one by me with the register on it is about six inches lower, so it’s not like I’ve got my school work all spread out where customers will have to deal with it.

Anyway, a customer orders a couple of large drinks.  I prepare them and put them on the (higher) counter in front of him then go to the register to ring him up.  He slides the drinks down closer to the register and pays me, at which point I notice that there are also some people outside.  I go outside to deal with them.  It’s chilly but a decent night outside, for late October at least, and I chat with the outdoor couple (the girl is cute) for a couple of minutes, then stand out there for no good reason for a few minutes more and then head back inside.

To carnage.

The customer has either accidentally spilled (charitable) or deliberately poured (which is what it looks like, but seems unnecessary) at least one of his large drinks all over the counter and thus all over everything else I have left to grade.  A large drink here is 32 ounces, which means probably 20 ounces of liquid and another 12 ounces of ice which has had a fair amount of time to melt all over the rest of my grading for the evening.  The customer, who managed to do this without any sort of loud exclamation of surprise or anything like that (which may be a sign of deliberateness or may just mean that I have bad ears) has disappeared, not spending any of the tokens that he also bought when he got his drinks.  The lady he was with is also gone.  Nowhere is there any sign that he made any attempt to rescue any of my shit from the pool of spreading apocalypse and it’s managed to migrate its way under the register and is damn close to my computer by the time I get into the room.  Also all over the floor.

Ten minutes of swearing and cleaning later, I decide that rather than trying to sort any of this shit out I’m just going to give any kid who was in class the day the assignments got collected full credit; it probably makes more sense to simply throw them out altogether but screw it, it’s late in the quarter and there are already enough points in play that giving them full credit is only giving them a tiny grade boost.

The punchline:  this is the second time I’ve had to throw out the results of a mid-chapter quiz for my Algebra class, and I’ve only given two of them.  I’m not doing any more of them anymore; they’re bad luck.