Academic piracy by peripheral vision

You spent an evening learning the material. Somebody else spent twelve seconds leaning slightly to the left.

Why this tiny offence gets expensive

Copying is flattering only if you ignore the part where one person did the work and another person tried to download it with their eyes.

School has its own miniature bureaucracy, unwritten rules and strange power structures. That makes it perfect territory for a completely unofficial counter-bureaucracy.

The completely unofficial accounting view

Petty Invoice values the offence at €40.00. The calculation is not economics, law or accounting; it is the ancient discipline of turning irritation into a number with two decimal places.

The charge description reads: Licence fee for unauthorised reproduction of academic intellectual property by suspicious sideways glancing.

Recommended administrative response

Treat your answers as premium intellectual property and issue a completely unofficial licence fee.

The point is the contrast: a familiar little annoyance gets treated with the solemn paperwork of a finance department. The more disproportionate the bureaucracy, the better the joke.