Thirty Minutes

What is the difference between a beer and a pee?
Answer: Thirty Minutes

This is the joke from Santiago as a penalty for coming late to a Managerial accounting class by Mario Resse.

Many professors have their own mechanisms to ensure that people are on time for classes. Our class has been fairly very good so far – mostly on time, except for Vlad who goes to bed at 6 am when the classes begin at 9 am. Well, Vlad is an exception; his body is yet to decide when it should go to sleep and when it should awake. He says he slept for 4 hours totally in 4 days during this week and I believe him – he has managed to read up all the material he could on Sovereign Wealth Funds for the Kansleramt Visit and also do his part for the Operations presentation and also write the first draft for the Marketing paper.

During the first module, Konstantin (OB) had a rule – if you were late, you buy a bottle of wine for the Bergfest (our weekly(?) get together) and we collected about 12 bottles. Of course, this includes when you were late even by a minute. So, that is a fairly low number. Eric (Marketing) had us contribute 10 Euros to a charity to be selected by the class and he was kind enough to promise to give a matching contribution to the charity. Now, that is asking for trouble. So, the last day, all of us decided to be late by 2 minutes and we all chipped in 10 Euros each, or 310 Euros for the 31 of us and Poor Eric had to shell out 310 Euros. Eric is definitely a good sport. I am sure that if this message got out, none of the professors would ever offer to match our contribution for coming late.

Francis (Decision Making) was more direct. He said that coming late would affect the class participation scores automatically. I do not know if he went through with his threat but this unknown element was enough to ensure that we were on time. Of course, with Francis, he has this twinkle in his eyes when he says something that we are not sure if he was joking or if he was being a cool assassin with a smiling exterior. Michal (Economics) and Zimmerman (Intro to Accounting) were very nice on this front. – no threats, no penalties… but by now, we were Pavlov dogs and automatically thought there was a loss if we were late.

Second module – there were no threats and there were some signs of the Pavlovian behavior wearing off when Mario Resse decided to put an end to this by saying that anyone who is late had to tell a joke to the class and hence the joke from Santiago. This is counterproductive, as telling jokes took away some of the time of the class. Being an accountancy professor, Mario realized his mistake pretty quickly and has proposed some pretty unique suggestions including having a quiz with the number of questions matching the number of minutes of being late. He may eventually go back to having us buying a bottle of wine but of a brand of his suggestion.

Just a few minutes after the joke, Mario got back at Santiago. When Santiago answered a question from Mario wrong, Mario made the gesture of an imaginary gun and asked what is the difference between the answer from Santiago and pointed the imaginary gun at Santiago and said “pop” – The answer: 2 Seconds!!! The class rolled up in laughter at the quick comeback by Mario. Mario 1, Santiago 0.