Tardy? Yes, but...

I've written before about Mr. D., my middle and high school orchestra director.  Mr. D. had a sense of time that was all his own.  Fairly often, he would start talking after class about a piece we were playing, a piece another orchestra was playing, or about his experiences as a music teacher.  During my junior year, I would ask him to fill out a tardy excuse slip for my next class.  After about five minutes of additional talking, I'd have to ask him to change the time on the slip.  It got to the point where he just dispensed with the tardy slips.  Instead, I asked him to initial a piece of notebook paper.  I would walk into my sixth hour class, hold up the page with Mr. D.'s initials, and the teacher wouldn't question it.  After all, he'd heard about Mr. D.'s in-his-own-world ways.  Considering that music teachers often exist in their own reality, I probably wasn't the only student who had such a routine.