A week into the new semester a student comes to my office, a serious look on his face.

"Can I help you?" I ask. I am a professional.

"It's Thursday." he says simply.

"No problem." I reassure him. "I have a long history of helping students on Thursdays."

"No." he says. "There was no blog post yesterday."

"Ah." I say, realising that that might be true. "I guess I got busy."

"Isn't that part of your job though?"

"Nope. It's extracurricular."

He clearly doesn't know the word. I pull the Unabridged Webster's Dictionary off my shelf and slam it down on the table in front of him.

He looks at the dictionary. It is an impressive tome. My Dad brought it with him from England when he came to Canada, and I spend endless hours with it in my childhood, looking for obscure words. I brought it with me when I came to Korea, and none of my brothers were ever the wiser.

"It means 'not school work'." I say. No way I would let him touch my dictionary with his grubby hands.

He just stares at it; blatantly stares.

"Eyes up here, boy." I say, pointing at my eyes.

"Aren't you going to write the blog any more then?" he asks. "I only took your class so I might make it onto the blog."

"I suppose I need inspiration. You guys give me nothing. I'm giving you gold with my..." I guess he is probably from the algebra class. I would recognise him if he were in the graduate graph class. "...with my binary operations. Gold, boy. And you just sit there silent, without even a smile. What is there to write about?"

"Can't you just make something up?"

"Piss off!" I say, "It is semi-autobiographical. I can't just make shit up. I'd lose my job."

That's not true. But I think I have something to write about this week. Now I just have to see if the AI can come up with an appropriate picture.