UpDate - Vol. 12, No. 2, Page 9
September 10, 1992
Ex-student's campus memory featured in 'Reader's Digest'
As a dorm resident at the University of Delaware in Newark, I
faced stiff penalties for operating appliances in my room. One day,
alerted to the arrival of a safety inspector, I quickly unplugged my
hot plate and, unfortunately my clock. The inspector entered, nosed
around, and was about to leave when she noticed the clock. "Is this
working?" she asked suspiciously.
"Oh, I only plug it in to see what time it is," I blurted. To my
surprise, the response satisfied her and she left the room.. *
Sometimes in looking back on college days, it's the quirky,
funny, little things that linger in one's memory.
That was the case with Donna Cote, who graduated from the
University in the winter of 1982.
The clock incident she recounts, which happened while she lived
in Warner Hall, was at the back of her mind for several years until
she finally decided to write it down and submit it to the Campus
Comedy section of Reader's Digest.
The "culprit" in her story was the extension cord, she explained.
Students, she said, used them to hook up legal and illegal appliances,
and when she hurriedly unplugged hers, everything stopped working.
Now a U.S. Army captain, Cote is a combat operations analyst in
Leavenworth, Kan. A member of ROTC at Delaware, she was a criminal
justice major and has been in military service since graduation.
She was stationed in Germany for six years before her current
assignment.
* Contributed by Donna M. Cote, reprinted with permission from
the August 1992 Reader's Digest. Copyright 1992 by The Reader's Digest
Assn., Inc.