This is humorous and ironic essay that describes the excuses that the writer, a teacher, has come across in her years of teaching. The whole tone of the essay conveys a sense of disbelief – that some students will invent almost any excuse to explain why an assignment is late or cannot be submitted. The title ‘The Dog Ate My Disk, and Other Tales of Woe’ is directly related to the descriptive first paragraph where Segal describes the cartoon she has taped to her office door. In a good-homored way she cheerfully admits that the cartoon and the warnings in the syllabus that she will not tolerate late work have “had absolutely no effect.” The ironic tone is established when she says that she wished her students used the same effort and ingenuity that they apply to their excuses to apply themselves to the missing or late assignments. The rest of the essay categorizes the excuses, and this process of categorization is part of the humour, because it suggests that the excuses are predictable and she has heard them, or variants of them, many times before.
The first three categories absolve the student from all blame, and usually involve illness or incapacity and sometimes even death of a family member, a friend’s family member or the behaviour of their roommate. The image of someone “throwing up blood” is repeated to show Segal’s scepticism about the excuses. Her sardonic, ironic tone is clear when she writes “Creative students may win extra extensions (and days off) with careful planning and fuller plot development” – reporting that a close relative’s illness leads to hospital and then a little later to death. On the subject of family problems and a student saying “I had to help my family”, Segal is especially sarcastic – “I do not understand why anyone would turn to my most irresponsible students in times of trouble.” In the next paragraph the phrase “heart-warming concern for others” is especially sarcastic. Segal even jokes with her classes how amazing it is that “the simple act of my assigning a topic for a paper seemed to drive large numbers of otherwise happy and healthy middle-aged women to their deaths.” [This after a student had told her, “My best friends’ mother killed herself.”
Segal mocks the innovations of the computer age because they have given students a further range of ready-made excuses which are impossible to prove or disprove, and to show their predictability, she lists them as bullet points. I find these excuses doubly amusing because, although some students may well use them as excuses, sometimes there are genuine problems with computers – my printer always runs out of ink on the night before an important assignment is due in, but what teacher would believe me?
Segal saves the most bizarre stories for her final section which concerns one student who has a bizarre accident with a chain saw which, rather preposterously, leads to her changing degree course from surgery to English and also, because she has time on her hands, to develop an internet relationship with a European, who she is flying off to meet in Rome. Segal shows her disbelief in this highly complicated story in the final funny sentence of the essay in which the student hopes she will “accept late work if the pope wrote a note.” This is clearly exaggerated and not true – are we to believe that a student seriously thought she could get the Pope to write a note explaining why her assignment was late? A fittingly funny end to a witty essay.
