A Bag of Cheats

Hundreds of millions of years ago, I was approached by a friend of mine who was very much in need of my help. A history final was coming up and he was having doubts about his knowledge regarding the subject. I figured this is a good time to dole out some advice so I told him:

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”

Not the greatest piece of advice, I’ll admit, but advice nonetheless. I walked away believing this would put his mind at ease but his continuous pleading assured me that it didn’t. I was wondering why he was so adamant about having me assist him when there were other more “qualified” candidates. The only thing I ever did with history in school was sell my notes for $20 a pop. Maybe he liked my entrepreneurial pursuits. Who knows? I eventually agreed to help this poor fella (against my better judgment as I am very anti-cheating) and soon thereafter, we devised an ingenious scheme. Our master plan had me inform the proctor that I was famished from not eating that morning so I need to eat the bag of M&Ms I had with me. My friend and I chose orange, blue, green, yellow, and red to represent a letter from A to E for multiple choice questions.

Wanted for aiding and abetting

As far as essay questions were concerned, we didn’t have enough colors to make up for the other 21 letters of the alphabet so he was on his own. As it turned out, I could’ve used his help as my essays were half a page each. Space allotted for each essay question? 3 pages. Are ya kidding?? But I digress. We were doing just fine for about 15 minutes as I kept sliding the correct colors into the “answer zone” on my desk. Then the totally foreseeable happened. As the test progressed, we began to run out of colors! At some point, letters A and D were no longer in use. I could see my friend crossing his mental fingers hoping that the remainder of the questions had B, C, or E as the correct answer. Then my sugar addiction kicked in. I ended up wolfing down the rest of the “answers”, effectively abandoning him on an island of his own stupidity.

He should’ve bought me a King-Size bag.