ZAP! You're Gone!

Every young student dreams that someday one of his or her teachers will actually go certifiably insane. We certainly had this dream in our school, and many of our classmates got to experience the ultimate thrill: they got to watch the teacher go insane right before their eyes!

You’ll undoubtedly think that this story is purely fictional, but it really did happen. This isn’t one of those stories, like the ones about people who wake up in an unfamiliar bathtub full of ice and with missing spleens, or whatever.

Mr. D., as we’ll call him, was the librarian at the high school. Apparently this must be a much more stressful job than we had imagined, what with the constant fear of paper cuts and such. One afternoon, some kids were making more noise than what is appropriate for the hallowed grounds of a library, and Mr. D. asked them to be quiet.

Well, as school legend has it, instead of hushing up, one of the students made an obscene remark to Mr. D. For a few moments, Mr. D.’s face began to turn red with rage, and eventually he pointed two fingers – his pointer finger and his pinky – at the student, and yelled, “ZAP! YOU’RE GONE!”

The story would have been plenty amusing enough had it ended there, but Mr. D. continued zapping students and objects in the library. As we have heard from extremely reliable sources, he began spinning a globe, zapping off countries. And he even made it into a hallway where he zapped some fellow teachers.

Fortunately, the State Police barracks was directly across the street, and a car was on the scene very quickly. As the story goes, Mr. D. was restrained and led to the police car. But even while restrained, he managed to zap the car with his arms behind his back. And he refused to get in the car “because it had been zapped,” naturally.

Of course, being high school students, we all handled this incident with extreme maturity and dignity, greeting each other in the hallways with the pointer and pinky fingers extended and a friendly, “Zap! You’re gone!” for years to come. Strangely enough, that was the last we ever saw of Mr. D.