I’ve had a really weird interaction with this professor. So, total tangent, I, at the time, was working at a retail store and it was — it would’ve — must have been December. So, it would have been that winter semester, but around Christmas.
And my professor had come in to buy something — it was my professor and then their child. And I was really uncomfortable, not because I had an issue with this professor initially, but they had come in and I was trying to check them out and their credit card kept getting declined. And I knew like, “Oh, I have their exam in a couple days. Like, this is really uncomfortable.” And I kept saying, “Oh, I don’t know. It says –” Um, what would that be? Uh, non-sufficient funds. “It says NSF, like, I don’t know what that means.” I was trying to, like, get him off the hook, trying to get him to use a different card. I said — so I said that initially and then I said, “I think the card reader isn’t working.”
So, I go into the back to talk to my manager and I said, “Hey, like, the — you know, his card keeps getting declined. Like, what do I do?” And — I said, “Can you come out there and just like razzle-dazzle and, you know, like, smooth this over?” I was, whatever, 20? Probably 20, 21, and I was just so uncomfortable. And normally my manager would be right there, but he was like, “I will not talk to that man.” And I was like, “Excuse me?” And he was like, “You heard me, like, you’re on your own.” And I was like, “What in the world?” So I went back out and I don’t know what I said. I think eventually I was like, “I need a different card. Give me a different card, this one is not working.” And so he did and it was — like, it was, like, 30 dollars. It was not a ton of money. So that card went through.
And after he left, I went in the back and I was like, “What the hell? Like, that was so lame!” You know, I — and I had said when I went back there like, “This is my professor and I’m feeling really uncomfortable.” And then he launches into this whole story about how — ‘cause when my professor had walked in, he had acknowledged my manager, like, nodded at him, which I thought that was kinda weird. And apparently this professor who was probably, like, in his early 40s at the time I would guess, and my manager was, like, just under 30. So apparently he, my professor, had cheated on his wife with my manager’s friend. They’d had this affair and I don’t think the friend knew that he was married at the time.
Well, eventually the wife found out and threatened him, you know, “If you don’t cut this off, like, our marriage is over.” So he was sorta forced to admit what happened and that was very upsetting to the friend, so they went their separate ways. But the professor, like, couldn’t really drop it. He kept sniffing around, he would send like, “Oh, Merry Christmas” texts or just “Happy birthday.” Like, would just kinda crop up and was not really respecting the boundary that he himself had set. So my manager just really did not have any respect for him, understandably. And so yeah, that was I guess what was happening in the background.