Even though I constantly bitch about everything, life here at Oakland University isn’t really all that bad. Nice campus, decent coffee, lots of lovely urinals; couldn’t ask for more.

But in the midst of all the wholesome goodness that is OU, there has always been one thing that has kept me up at night, causing me to wet the bed (figuratively): professors who institute attendance policies. Strap in for a terrible ride; this isn’t funny at all guys, just saying.

If you asked me which is worse — attendance policies in college or communism — I would call you stupid for asking me such a ridiculous question, but seriously, attendance in college is preposterous. It is absolute savagery to expect us wonderful young men and women to pay all the money to go to this institution, only to turn around and penalize us for missing a few classes.

It’s important to understand that there is no “official” attendance policy, it is solely based on each and every professor’s prerogative. This is what makes it so frustrating, that it is really not something that will ever be remedied, at least not easily.

I will raise my children in the woods and make it their sole purpose in life to create an army of woodland creatures that will use critical thinking and jet skis to one day solve the problem of attendance policies in school. I literally don’t know what the hell I’m saying half the time, guys.

I still remember the first class that I got screwed in because of attendance. It was a MWF class, one hour a day; some useless gen-ed that literally had no impact on my education or future whatsoever.

The policy was basically if you missed three classes in the semester you would go down a whole letter grade, then it would go down another one for any other days missed.

So, in the course of the semester I would have had something like 35 or 40 class periods, and I’m only allowed to miss three. Clearly that professor just wanted to make the students in my class fear for their lives on a daily basis. It got to the point where people would come to class, even in the most dire of situations, because they were terrified to miss a class.

Kids would be coming to class with iron lungs, missing limbs; and there was me; the asshole who missed like eight class periods while everyone else braved their hardships. Long story slightly shorter: I end up getting a 1.6 in a class that I could have aced while intoxicated. And this is the problem with our world.

A few professors I have spoken to on the subject have claimed that they have attendance policies because it is disrespectful to sign up for a class and then not show up. Unless you miss a bunch of classes and then show up and act like an obnoxious ass (and there are a lot of those people, don’t get me wrong), I don’t see a problem with it.

If you still do the work and don’t create extra work for the professors by asking stupid questions then what difference does it make? I still have to pay thousands of dollars to take the class, and they still get paid regardless of how many times I come to class. We all know I don’t need yet another reason to be pissed all the time.

If there’s actually even one coherent thought splattered somewhere in this cesspool of text that I call my own, it is this: attendance, which seems unnecessary to me, is clearly looked upon by our educators as something of the utmost importance. But really, there is no meaning in life or in this story. Give me your children. Have a great semester.