How much are you willing to pay to get yourself out of a jam? The old saying is, "desperate times call for desperate measures" but that can be costly... and hurt really bad when you take it up the... well, let's get to Tanner's misfortune.
We all had classes in school that we couldn’t stand to attend. For me, it was anything involving writing. Yeah, I know, look where it got me. For Tanner, he’s always fancied himself a nerd – with one minor, perhaps major exception. He couldn’t stand book reports.
Tan never understood the point of book reports. He always felt the story was the story and that was it. Why did sections need to mean or represent something? Couldn’t it just be appreciated for what it was? (To this day he argues that a book report, or the process of writing one, has never benefitted him in adulthood. “Maybe if you want to analyze the shit out of everything, I guess,” he said, when I talked to him about this.
Tanner, who in seventh grade got all A’s on his report card except for one C+ in English, was determined in the next term to have all A’s. How did he plan to achieve that? If you answered, by studying hard and applying himself, you don’t know Jack… or Tanner.
Tanner’s old enough that in high school the internet was a useful tool in researching papers though it wasn’t as much for helping students cheat on schoolwork. (Think between the Napster and MySpace days.)
With no interest in reading a certain book, Tanner’s class had several weeks to do the reading and complete an assignment about the plot, the characters and the author’s intent in certain passages. Absolutely refusing --- REFUSING -- to do the reading but insisting on getting an A, Tanner began considering his options as the days counted down and the assignment deadline drew near.
Fortunately for Tanner, he was friends with some of the older kids in the school. He began asking them if they had their papers from that class. Most of them didn’t, citing the need to get rid of them because of their hatred for the course. And, as he ultimately discovered, the teacher rotated lesson plans so it wasn’t a book that was covered every year which limited Tanner’s pool of peers he could solicit.
As the days ticked away, Tanner felt the pressure of having still never cracked the book that he vowed to avoid. His last resort: the internet. Tanner looked online for book reports related to the title. He found general reviews and synopses but nothing that answered the specific questions posed to his class. As he scrolled Altavista search results (the Google before Google), Tanner found a website that purported to write custom book reports for students. Nowadays, there’s hundreds of those sites. Back in the day, it was a different story. (Maybe pun intended.)
The transaction seemed easy enough: submit your assignment and they’d have you a perfect paper in no time – almost literally. Within hours. While that didn’t seem sketchy to Tanner, he went ahead and put through an order, using his Paypal account, in the amount of $200. It was less than 48 hours before his paper was due and a nervous Tanner continually used a library computer to log into his Hotmail account (again, before the days of smartphones). Nothing.
He got home at the end of the school day and because his family didn’t have a computer, he made an excuse to hang out with his friend and casually ask to use his computer… every 10 minutes or so. With the friend wondering what was up – because Tanner was terrified about handing in a phony paper, let alone anyone knowing about it – he was unwilling to explain, fearing it would get around to his parents. Tanner said he was emailing with a girl overseas and wanted to see if she wrote back.
The visit that night ended with no paper and Tanner wondering if he’d been scammed. The website advertised the perfect paper – no typos, no factual errors, no misused punctuation, nothing – would be delivered within hours. Hours.
Night turned to day and Tanner rushed to the school’s library before classes on D Day – or A Day, he hoped. The dial-up connection was slow and ultimately Tanner saw that his purchase still hadn’t arrived in his inbox. He emailed the website, inquiring about what was keeping his paper, but with class starting he couldn't sit there to wait for a response. Now, with a knot in his stomach, he used the excuse that he had the shits and needed to go to the bathroom repeatedly that morning. Lie became reality when Tanner began splitting his time between the library bathroom and the library computer lab.
With the clock ticking – seemingly faster than his heart at this point – Tanner was now only hours away from his book report’s deadline. The possibility of speed reading and coming up with a half-assed paper wasn’t an option anymore. Not turning in a paper and having a zero on his record would surely drop him out of the C’s to at least a D.
English was his first class after lunch, so Tanner forewent his food (it wasn’t permitted near school computers) to neurotically refresh his Hotmail account to see when – or if – his grades could be maintained.
With barely 10 minutes to spare, Tanner received the email with the finished product. He quickly opened the file, hit the print button and rushed across the room to the printer. One page, two pages, three pages, four pages, five pages, six pages, seven pages – eight glorious pages to save the day.
As he rushed back to his seat, Tanner scanned the opening sentences of the first page – a paper to which he was about to sign his name… and handover to a teacher… with a judgey red pen.
His report was half English, a quarter some other language, and a quarter some other language. While the name of the book was correct (whew), the sentences were garbled and appeared to be thrown together by Google Translate – though at the time, that didn’t exist. Thinking perhaps he could edit the sentences with a fast proofread, Tanner looked at the clock to see it was a mere minutes until the bell to start class. Could he scan eight full pages in under eight minutes? And have time to make the edits, reprint it and get across the school before 1 p.m.? He sure as hell was going to try.
As he chopped out entire sections of the report that weren’t in English, Tanner trimmed the report in half – to four pages. Still, he noticed inconsistencies in how things were written, including improper capitalization, slowing down the progress as he discovered one error after the next.
With it widely known Tanner’s home didn’t have a computer, he banked on using the excuse that it was the school’s technology that prevented him from turning in his report on time. The printer ran out of ink or there was a paper jam or the computer crashed – something to make it not his fault.
He was late getting to the classroom, though alerted the librarian about the pretend problem with the technology so that he could easily tell the teacher, “Go ask the librarian, she knows there was a problem.” Standing at the teacher’s desk, doing everything he could to prevent his hand from shaking in fear, Tanner turned over his bought book report and took his seat.
As days went on, he anticipated the teacher walking up and down the aisles returning the papers to the students. Three days later it happened. With the students' heads down working on an assignment at their desks, the teacher zig-zagged across the room delivering the graded papers. He made a habit of placing them face down which only led to more anticipation for the big reveal.
It was easily a B paper, thought Tanner, having not fully read what he turned in. And a B was better than a C no matter how you alphabetize things. Prolonging the inevitable, Tanner came to terms and accepted that maintaining a C was better than dropping to a D. Yeah, a C would be fine. He could handle a C. Still, with an overturned blank white sheet staring at him, Tanner convinced himself he could live with a D. A D is much better than an F, which we all know stands for fail. A D on something he really had no part in was still better than a fail.
Now, looking closer at the stapled report on the corner of his desk, Tanner could see the last page – the one on top – with dozens of red notations and marks. He knew the outcome wouldn’t be good. He closed his eyes, took one deep swallow, reached for the papers, pulled them closer, flipped them over, looked down and slowly opened his eyes.
He got his D. And written in dark red ink, the words, “Did you even read this book?” in block letters right underneath Tanner’s name. Writing redder than his face turned in that moment.
At least a D isn’t a fail. He paid $200 and still took it up the ass.