Ted Olds fears he’ll fail to graduate after his parents sacrificed to send him to engineering school.
Ted Olds has worked as a Patent Examiner at the US Patent & Trademark Office. For the last thirty years he has worked as a patent attorney in a variety of high tech, and low tech areas. He has published short stories in a few small Journals. He mid-life crisis is storytelling. He has performed at a Risk event, and several Secret Society of Twisted Storytellers events. As a Moth "road tripper" he's told stories in many many cities, and has won 14 Moth Story Slams and in 8 different cities.
This story originally aired on Mar. 16, 2018, in an episode titled “Generations”.
Story Transcript
My dad died a couple years ago and, at the wake, my son said his grandfather was the wisest person he ever knew. And I get that. My dad was always with good advice. He was not petty. He never, ever held a past mistake over my head, except once.
My fifth year at Michigan State University, I had to finish my mechanical engineering degree. We were poor so I had need-based financial aid and I had student loans, but those end after five years. My parents kicked me what they could, but without the aid and the loans I couldn’t be there.
But it seemed doable. I had four senior-level courses to finish and two semesters to do it. The biggest problem was going to be me. I was a mess. I needed a job after graduation and there was a recession on. I was mailing resumes to companies that I knew had hired in the past, but I was getting postcards back that said, “From the size of the envelope, we assume this is a resume. We didn’t open it. We’re not hiring.”
Nothing could be more discouraging. It’s not like you can fix your resume and take another shot at it if they're not even looking.
A couple of times I got interviews, but that was actually almost worse. Like one, General Dynamics, has a tank point outside Detroit and I got an interview. They showed me into a room the size of a football field full of drafting tables. I'd be sitting five yards away from the next engineer. I really needed the job and I really didn’t want the job, you know. And they could tell.
Then, at the beginning of the year, my girlfriend dumped me. Now, I was already depressed about the job stuff so it really cut my legs out from under me. Pretty much every night I'd go to bars or parties trying to find somebody new, but I was such a train wreck no one was buying what I was selling, so I knew focus was going to be a problem.
But then beginning at the first semester, I came up with a scheme that I thought might get me through it. I had two classes, Thermodynamics 1 and Heat Transfer. Both classes, the professors handed out assigned homework every week. On Fridays they would leave printed copies of the perfect homework answers outside their office for us to pick up.
The exams were open, meaning you could bring in whatever you wanted. You could bring in your textbook, you could bring in those homework answers. I walked into the first exam in Thermodynamics and I was nervous. I hadn’t been going to class enough. I hadn’t been studying.
The exam lands in front of me. Question one: Steam leaves a boiler in a turbine power plant. You have 300 psi, 500 degrees Fahrenheit and it’s expanded to 14 psi before passing to a condenser. Evaluate the process as, a) a superheated Rankine cycle, b) a regenerative cycle with open loop cooling, and c) a regenerative cycle with closed loop cooling.
I had nothing, like nothing. And the other three questions were no better. I opened my textbook and I started thumbing through it, but it was a couple of weeks late for that. Then I picked up the homework answers and there was a question that looked almost like that. The numbers were different and it only looked at two of the three cycles but, still, it gave me like a skeleton, like two-thirds of the answer to that exam question.
And then there were other homework questions that looked like the other exam questions. The exams questions, they always went off on a tangent at the end and I could not figure out any of the tangents, but those homework questions gave me like basically 60 percent of the exam questions. It turned out hardly anyone knew the tangents.
So that was class average. A “B” at 2.5.
Two days later, my first exam in Heat Transfer followed the exact same script. I quit thinking about going to class. I quit thinking about studying. All I would do is go pick up the homework answers on Friday and then go to the exams. At the end of the first semester I had two 2.5s.
I came into the last semester confident. Thermodynamics 2 and Mechanics of Materials. Now, if you're going to follow my scheme today, you don’t even have to go to the first class because you can get the syllabus over the internet. But back then I needed the syllabus so I had to go to the first day of class because you need the syllabus because you need to know the test dates.
So I was there for the first day. It’s a new professor and he tells us this class is notorious as the one that flunks out more seniors than all others. It is intellectually rigorous. There would be two exams and a final and he had one iron-clad rule. If you miss an exam, it’s a zero. There are no make-ups. It was the last day I was in class.
I showed up at the first exam, I took out my homework answers, and I got my class average. Intellectually rigorous my ass.
I sold my textbook the next day for beer money. If anything, I became a worse student. About two-thirds into the term I had an exam in the Materials class. The syllabus said the next exam in Thermodynamics 2 would be two days later. The Materials class exam went according to script.
The one thing I was doing that was healthy is I was exercising still before I would go out and party, and so I was playing basketball pretty much every day. So after that exam that afternoon I went and I was playing basketball.
I was getting to be pretty good playing that much. It depended who I was playing against. Like if the other guys were from the football team, I was too small. But this day it was all the other engineering students and they were normally in school while I was normally playing basketball so I was the best player on the court. And it felt good.
I drive by this one guy and I make a finger-roll layup and I’m on top of the world as I’m jogging back upcourt, and he said to me, “How’d you do on the Thermo exam this morning?” And I said, “Oh, you mean the Materials exam. The Thermo final exam isn’t for two days.”
And he said, “The professor changed it a month ago. He's been reminding us in class every day. How could you not know that?”
I ran to my apartment, I grabbed the homework answers, I ran to the professor’s office.
“My car broke down on the interstate, sir. I missed the exam, but I can take it now.”
“You know my rule. You got a zero. There are no make-ups.”
Then he looks in this grade book and he said, “But you did pretty well on the first exam. If your final is even close to that you'll be fine.”
I took this as affirmation that my scheme was sound. In fact, there was a margin for error. But I did double-check the date of the final because I had to make it to that.
Well, the final was ugly from the start. None of the questions looked like a homework question. I put stuff down on each of them, but I knew it was gibberish.
I went to see the professor two days later and he told me I had the worst grade on the final in the class by far. He said he couldn’t understand it because the questions were straight out of the textbook and he had told us that at the review session.
I had sold my textbook and my scheme did not require attending review sessions. So he said he didn’t see how I could possibly pass but, luckily, the class was offered again in July.
I said, “Sir, I can’t afford to be here in July,” and that was true. “I will never use Thermodynamics. I've been admitted to law school in the fall.” That was a lie.
“Could you just please give me a 1.0? It will be the best thing.” I thought that was true.
He said he would look at my exam again, but he was not optimistic. The grades would be posted the morning of graduation.
My parents were so proud of me. I was the first in the family to go to college. Neither of them had the chance. They both wanted to. They couldn’t afford it. They both would have done great. They were smart people. And they had reserved a hotel room and a place at a restaurant months in advance.
They came up the night before graduation and they came to my apartment and I had to tell them. “I’m pretty sure I flunked the class and I’m not graduating.”
My dad was not an angry man, but I could see it bubbling up in his face. It was like the most disrespectful thing I had ever done to them. I had squandered this opportunity either of them would have killed to have. I had wasted all of what they had done. They sacrificed to get me there. I could see his face turning red and then he swallowed it and he said, “Let’s just go to dinner. We’ll see what happens in the morning.”
I didn’t sleep at all. I lay in bed and I did as a lapsed Catholic does do, I promised Jesus if he gets me the one point I will turn my life around.
And then the realist in me was like, “Okay, if I have to be here in July, I could commute. It’s a two-hour drive, but I can commute. I can couch-surf a little. Maybe I can get through it. It wouldn’t be fun, but…”
The next morning, I’m walking down the hallway to the professor’s office to see the grade and he comes out of his office and he tapes a paper to his door. He's walking toward me and he looks at the ground. He does not look me in the eye. I remembered like if you're on trial for something and the jury doesn’t look you in the eye, it’s either a really good sign or a really bad sign, and I couldn’t remember which.
But I got to the door and I looked at the paper and I got a 1.0! I was a college graduate.
That night at the graduation party, the guy across the hallway, his dad was a lawyer and he asked me what I was going to do next, and I said, “Well, I'd always wanted to go to law school, but in my dorm floor, freshman year, half of these guys wanted to go to law school so I figured what’s the point.”
He said, “No one with engineering degrees go to law school. You have to do that for patent law. It’s a great thing.”
And I applied to the Patent Office. This is under the Ronald Reagan federal government. He cut everywhere in the government except Department of Defense and, for some reason, the Patent Office was hiring. I don't know why. But because it was the government, it took them six months to hire me and then the job didn’t start for six months.
So I was living at home as a bum for a year, just doing one screw-up after another. My parents were pretty cool about it, particularly after the first six months when I had a job offer and there was like an end date to all of this. They got better about it.
And the job was perfect for me. I did go to law school and I got my life on track and I got married and I had kids and decades passed. In all of that time, my dad never once mentioned this big screw-up, not as criticism in that horrible year after graduation and not as a joke when things were going well. He never mentioned it until one of my own kids was twenty and he screwed something up.
I said, “Dad, this kid’s gonna drive me nuts. I can’t believe this person did this.”
And he said, “Do you remember what you told me the night before graduation?”
That was what he said. And that was all he needed to say, because what he was saying was what I did was way worse than what my kid did. And I turned stuff around and my kids were good kids and they were going to be fine.
It was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. And if he'd been hitting me over the head with it all of those decades, by the time I needed to hear it, it would have been played out. It wouldn’t have had any impact. Because he had kept quiet and saved it, I got the perfect parenting advice that day. It’s like my son said, my dad was the wisest person.
Thank you.