My Computer Ate My Homework (New and Improved Version)

Vol. 1 Issue 21

My computer ate my homework.

It’s one thing not to do your homework at all, and an even riskier one to admit to it; although admitting it may be somewhat honorable, unfortunately teachers rarely if ever see this honor, and the result is almost always a zero. A safer, more routinely used approach than that of the honorable admittance, and just an all around better excuse is the classic “my dog ate it” + variations. The “my computer ate my homework” excuse is just not ready yet for classroom use, but it has potential.

At the minimum the dog excuse could buy a slacking, excuse-using student some time. The excuse-using student may be able to copy, steal, or download someone else’s homework, hand it in the following class, and deflect the zero that the non-excuse using, honorably admitting student would have received.

I even argue that if the student uses it correctly it may be possible to actually use the dog excuse, with honor, and still get away with not doing the homework. First it is the “dog” component of the excuse that we must examine.

The dog excuse can no longer be taken as common or insubstantial. The excuse takes a place of mythological proportions and has an aura of mystery surrounding its origins. These characteristics allow for the excuse to be used as a myth of symbolism and interpretation. The dog excuse is universally known, yet no one knows exactly how or where it began, who invented it, or what the inventors intentions were. All its modern effectiveness is based on this mythological status, and any successful execution of the dog excuse would be owing to the confusion caused by this status; however it needs to be noted that modern slackers are almost never consciously aware of these devices when they use the dog excuse. Slackers don’t tend to care about such things.

Aware of it or not, this is why said slacker would use the dog excuse rather than truthfully saying” I left it on the bus.” With the bus excuse the slacker opens him or herself to the ridicule of truth; only the dog excuse here can provide shelter from this ridicule. “I left it on the bus” contains no confusion and the slacker would almost definitely be told by the teacher to bring in a new copy of the homework next class, an obvious problem if the homework was never done. Still, the bus excuse would buy the slacker some time just as the dog would, but by using the bus excuse they are not really contributing anything to the greater good.

The dog is superior because to interpret the dog excuse nowadays is to comprehend it with more meaning than just its obvious tenor. This includes many other possibilities of not possessing ones homework, yet all the while not having had a dog actually eat it. It’s not just not doing your homework, but assuming that maybe you did do it yet still have a honorable reason for not possessing it such as having had it stolen, had it ruined in the rain, having burned it, had it chopped-up by a lawnmower, a snow blower, a wood chipper, or a paper shredder, having had it destroyed by acid, liquid nitrogen, or a meteorite, or even, having lost it (left it on the bus), “Dog” here could act as a stand in for any of the aforementioned honorable reasons. These all being indisputability real events that could have happened. As such, the eating of the homework by said dogs can no longer be taken as just an arbitrary excuse but is now a metaphor, a symbol for any number of real scenarios.

In using the dog as a metaphor the slacking student is creating a buffer between themselves and the reason that they do not posses their homework. The dog metaphor is like an honor among slackers. We have no idea what “dog” even means. A teacher cannot really say to a student, “I know your dog did not eat your homework” because of course the slacker doesn’t mean it literally; it could mean anything. The modern slacker student owes the success of this excuse to confusion caused by its mythological status. For this many thanks need to go to the slackers of the past who implemented the excuse, refined it, and tested it over and over until evolved into the effective form we have today.

On a technical note, excuse-using students are not usually prone to confessing outright that they did or did not do something. Therefore to actually hear the excuse “my dog ate my homework” in its original form is very rare. If the student were to use the original this would convey the implication of outright admittance. Much more likely is the situation where the student is confronted, or “busted” for not handing the homework in. The teacher would then ask the slacker “where is your homework?” The student replying, “my dog ate it.”  

The preservation of the dog excuse’s status is being constantly maintained by thousands of people everyday using the “dog” to stand in for both real life and fake scenarios. In extreme cases even honor students have contributed its preservation. When asked, “where is your homework” they reply “My dog ate it,” only to then throw off all expectation by then pulling out a finished copy of the homework and handing it in; thus causing the dog excuse to take on yet another meaning, that of having actually done the work!

Who can say that the dog excuse is even an excuse anymore? It has become the simple statement of a fact; the excuse has been transformed into a symbol of ambiguity. It is the hard work of preservationists who, thought their contributing to the excuse’s multiple meanings, allow for it to be theoretically possible to be able to claim that one’s dog ate one’s homework and still maintain a degree of honor. Every time someone uses the dog statement in an unorthodox or the crazy way they are contributing to its maintenance, and hopefully solidifying it for future generation’s uses, and abuses, of system.

My situation needs neither an explanation nor the maintaining of honor. More just some kind justification as to where the homework has disappeared to. I think the “eat,” rather than the “dog” component of the statement is more applicable here.

In this day-and-age, the fact that my computer ate my homework is much more believable than it would have been say forty years ago, but that is only if by “eat,” we mean destroy. Saying that your computer “ate” it just means the file(s) got damaged, erased, or as in my case, saved-over somehow. If we took eat in its literal sense, like with the whole digestion and eventual excretion thing, then the dog to computer eating ratio would be 1:0, it being impossible for a computer to literally “eat” an object. If we changed the meaning of “eat” just to mean  “ingest,” then it would be possible for a computer to literally “eat” your homework if it was a computer operated animal, i.e. a robot dog. We could also get into animals generated by computers i.e. cartoon dogs eating homework in computer generated animation.

Obviously, not as much work has been put into the computer excuse so it is not as triumphant a construction as the dog, but hopefully I have shown with my preceding paragraph that the computer excuse has potential for use with modern day, and future slackers.

I’m pretty sure there is no honor in losing your work to your computer, because if your computer ate your homework this almost always means that you did do the work, but lost it. There is no ambiguity here like with the dog thing dammit.

My computer ate my homework this weekend. It was just enraging. It could have been much worse, much worse…but it stilled sucked.

Crappy travel stories will have to wait until next week.