some days my job is quite rewarding.

my favorite student came to the desk the other day in a modest scarf. and asked if the world was going to end.

I raised an eyebrow and checked to see if he was kidding but the guy was genuine. 

I said “hang on a minute, I’ll check my dairy….. end of the world? nope I don’t have anything like that planned.”

Then he explained that he’d heard that the Mayan’s calendar ended next year and some folks said that this meant the end of the world would happen.

I reassured him this wasn’t the case, it was merely that the Mayan’s had got so far ahead with their calendar that they decided to take a break.

“Besides cultural tastes were changing and people had started to want different things in calendars, something smaller that would hang on a toilet door with a picture of puppies or kittens on it. And it’s one thing to carve a huge stone disk with advanced mathematical calculations on it but it’s much harder to carve three adorable Labrador puppies in a basket….I’m sure how you can understand why any serious mathematician would find that not only difficult but a waste of his time!

And you see you can’t hang a huge stone disk on the back of your toilet door, they tend to tear down your hut wall or worse, fall onto you, trapping you for eternity in a septic tank. So the Mayan’s turned to smaller calendars made of paper, some with scantily clad ladies on them, and these don’t survive over the eons nearly as well.”

“Oh,” he says,” because paper doesn't last as well as stone”

“That and their wives tend to throw them out” I assert while nodding convincingly and thinking he is in on the joke.

Then he asks “are you serious?”…

"Only about the world not ending due to the end of a calendar, if that was the case it would end yearly and everyone using power tools would look like a breaker girl.”

I suspect my workmates hysterical giggling confirmed his suspicion that some of the info I’d given him wasn’t quite right, but he toddled off at least happy the world wouldn’t end. What shocked me was the last comment he made.

“I’m glad because that would mean the Brisbane roar wouldn’t be able to win a third premiership!”

As you can imagine I just had to tell someone ;-)