Attendance Hacking

It’s 2014. 17 year old omegastick has just been called into the headmaster’s office.

The headmaster is a nice guy. Mid-40s, soft spoken, cheap suit. He asks me to sit down.

We chat for a while about coursework grades (good), university applications (good), career prospects (I’m 17 what do you expect?).

Then, he shows me a clipboard. On the clipboard is a list. It’s a list of every student in the school, ordered by attendance rate.

At the top there are 4-5 people with 100% “perfect” attendance. My eyes scan downwards. A slightly larger group underneath them: “95%+ Great”. Then the normies: “90%+ Good” and “80%+ OK”. Below them, the truants: “50%+ Needs Attention”.

Then, all the way at the bottom:

CRITICAL - Severely Absent

omegastick: 34%

“We need to talk about your attendance,” says the headmaster.

“Not great, huh?” I respond. It’s true. I’m a lazy fucker. I could try and blame it on health or something, but the reality was that I just didn’t see the point in going to class. I would much rather have been sitting at home on the computer (our Minecraft server was blowing up) than endure through a mind-numbing class for a test I could take today and pass. Sometimes I would stay in the common room and hang out with whoever was on their break while my other friends went to class.

“Your grades are good and you’re on your way to getting into a university. This is the final term before you graduate, so I’m going to let it slide,” he says. Phew.

“But,” (un-phew) “there’s a prize draw at the leaver’s assembly. It’s a brand new iPad. To be in the draw, you need 100% attendance. I think you could do it if you tried.”

I laugh it off, but in my head wheels are turning. I leave that office with the seed of a plan planted in the fertile ground of my mind.

For the next 3 months, instead of skipping class completely, I turned up 5 minutes before the class finished to get marked as 55 minutes late, rather than absent. I guess the teachers didn’t mind because better attendance looked good for them? Who am I kidding? They probably hated me.

Fast forward to the end of year assembly. The whole year is in the common room. The headmaster gives his half-hearted goodbye, then a word from a few of the teachers. Then the secretary steps up holding a plastic tub in her hand. The bit I’d been waiting for. The draw.

My mate - who knew about the scheme from the start - elbows me and says that he will “fucking murder” me if my name comes out of that bucket.

The secretary’s hand dives in and rummages around theatrically - think Hunger Games. She produces a small white slip of paper.

“omegastick”

The crowd goes wild. I graduate the most hated person in the school. Public enemy #1.

I don’t know if there’s a moral here. I regret that I didn’t apply myself to the right things in high school. I totally could have actually turned up and tried hard and gone to a much better university. On the other hand I got a good story and an iPad out of it.

- omegastick