The head of the geology department at a Western engineering college was a brisk, business-like scientist who felt he was there to teach, not to fraternize with the students.
Several pranksters in one of his classes were irritated by his aloof manner and his disdain of their wisecracks. They decided to show him up.
Obtaining a fragment of concrete from the materials-testing laboratory, they handed it to him just before his lecture one morning, said they had found it on a field trip, and asked him to identify it.
The geologist looked at it carefully, bounced it on his palm several times, and handed it back.
"I think," he said with a smile, "that it's a piece of damned insolence."
-- Arnold P. Wilking
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