Professor With 3 Distinct PHDs Cannot Decipher Intricacies of YouTube Autoplay, Jumpscares Self for Third Class in a Row

By Nancy Feng | Photo by Tara Mullaney

My professor is really cool. He’s got around twenty thousand citations. He’s a visionary in the field. All in all, a successful and storied academic career. Now he’s teaching intro psych to a bunch of hapless freshmen. He’s showing us videos about his favorite case studies. We watch a monkey cling to a wire simulacra of his mother. It’s pretty fucked up. I watch in agony clutching the edge of the desk as he mouses his cursor at a glacial rate over to the pause button in the corner of the video. “You know you can click anywhere on the screen to pause, or use the space bar if you’d like!” I supply in my most helpful, least condescending tone. “Oh,” is all he says with a furrowed brow before continuing to creep his cursor over to the same pause button. I count four entire seconds. 

“So basically, the monkey ends up choosing to starve to death clinging to the cloth mother. What does that tell us?” And then participation-point-hungry hands go up but I’m too dazed to contribute. This man’s IQ is larger than the entire class combined! Why wouldn’t he just use the shortcut to save time? Why go through such a tedious process each and every time? He’s had to have used a computer before. A student finishes her piece and he nods in encouragement and takes this time only three seconds to unpause the video. At this point I’m not paying any fucking attention to whatever the monkey does or the researchers learn. The video comes to a close and he switches chrome tabs back to Blackboard, but I’m still not listening. I know what comes next. I’ve lived this Sisyphean moment a hundred times over. 

The infernal cacophony of a social experiment youtuber’s voice rings out over the sound system, jolting the sleepy class into an unpleasant alertness. “What’s up you guys! Today we have sixteen cartons of eggs and we’re gonna throw them at as many homeless people we can find!!!” His shrill voice thunders out. Inexplicably, this was the next video in my professor’s Youtube recommended. My professor who is also ninety clutches at his chest, just like he did the day before and the day before that, as if this was unexpected. I simmer in quiet rage as I watch him repeat the process. This time it takes five seconds.

 I’ve had enough. Something needs to be done. I get up on my feet. 

“Professor, with all due respect, this is the third class in a row you’ve let this happen to you. Autoplay has been a central feature to the platform since 2015. You’re a really smart guy, probably legally a genius. How do you keep making this mistake?” I ask, wringing my hands.

His eyes glint with playful malice. “You think one semester of intro pysch entitles you to demean the riches of my Emersonian mind?” He sneers. “Well, no….” I stammer, but he tells me to sit my insipid undergrad ass down.