It was in the wee hours of the dawn when sightings were first reported. Initially, students weren’t quite sure what they saw as a strange humanoid figure slowly made its way through the university’s corridors. The squeak of its New Balance sneakers alerted those nearby of its presence as it trudged along in a sort of awkward waddle, stopping only to give the occasional passerby a crooked smile. It was the kind of smile that seemed to suggest its recipient should feel gratitude for the mere fact that a being this important would spare a moment for acknowledgment.
For the faculty members and students who were bold enough, the idea was floated that they should call in a team of trained cryptozoologists to help track and capture the elusive creature. After all, they could have a new variant of sasquatch on their hands or maybe even some kind of babadook. Sadly for them, their hopes were dashed as the fog of comfortable delusion that conveniently prevents humans from seeing what they don’t want to see lifted, and the reality of the so-called cryptid presented itself.
This was not beast but man. A powerful man. The most powerful man on campus, to be exact. It was Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco walking along with his pants down around his ankles. Apparently, he had forgotten to pull them up that morning.
According to eyewitnesses, he showed up at work that way, having driven his semi-aquatic Chancellor-mobile 4,087 miles across the Atlantic Ocean from Vatican City—his typical daily commute—with his trousers by his feet. How he wasn’t pulled over by the Coast Guard is one of many mysteries surrounding this event, with the others relating to the baffling fact that the chancellor appeared completely oblivious to his wardrobe malfunction.
“Wouldn’t you feel the breeze?” asked one student.
“Wouldn’t you question why your legs suddenly lost their usual range of motion?” asked another.
Apparently, in the chancellor’s world, these were not the sorts of questions that mattered. What he seemed to be concerned with was completing the tasks on his agenda, which for this day included his usual things such as pacing around his office on official-sounding phone calls and standing in his favorite corner, wrapped in blankets, pretending he was in a cocoon metamorphosing into a big butterfly man.
Over the course of the day, he sauntered through the halls, frequently tripping over his own feet as he moved between various meetings. Had he gone mad? This was certainly a possibility, and it became especially apparent watching him try to go up the stairs. Oh, the stairs.
The chancellor ALWAYS takes the stairs. Since making his longstanding, fitness-motivated pact with close friend, Pope Francis, dubbing themselves the “Stair Brothers,” the chancellor hasn’t as much as a thought about using an elevator or an escalator. He hasn’t even flown in a plane, famously insisting: “Until they make a set of stairs to get me up that high, I stay on the ground. Stair Bros for life!”
Now, his sense of devotion has become his downfall. As I’m sure you can imagine, the sight of a fully grown man with his pants around his ankles attempting to traverse four flights of stairs is a sight that the English language—or any modern-day language—can hardly describe. Luckily, the ancient and forgotten tongue of the Nopantsonians provide specific words for this kind of situation.
He scrunched his scramp as he, once again, breembled his way up another step. With a heevee scrug, he folormped onto his oomple bomp, breathing a sigh of light gornk. A few innocent bystanders, caught in the fray of the sad breembling, pranced around the chancellor, giving him little time to reach out, grinkledink onto their legs, and skizzle himself up to the next floor like a bad luck boomble-docket. “Holy, Mother Mary!” He called out, trastilating his sore scramp before reaching and weebling the next step with his gleeb. This process continued, interrupted by the occasional folormping, for a little over an hour before the chancellor finally made it to the fourth floor, shlanked aggressively all over the place, and realized he was in the wrong building.
That was a rough translation.
After witnessing enough of the pathetic spectacle, a task force was assembled by the administration to raise the chancellor’s pants. One person suggested they coax him into using the restroom, believing that he would then realize his pants were down. Others feared that the chancellor might have been so backward that he would pull his pants up to relieve himself and back down again when he was finished, and nobody was prepared to deal with that.
They bickered for hours, unable to agree on anything, until a young intern stood up and shouted, “Why don’t we just tell the chancellor that his pants are down?”
“The sacrifice of the brave intern will not go unforgotten,” read the administration’s address to the student body after the young man’s immediate firing. He had taken one for the team by telling the chancellor the ugly truth. It was a tough pill for him to swallow, but after the confusion, denial, screaming and hopping around campus like a child determined to win the world’s longest potato sack race, the administration finally managed to catch the chancellor in a large net and convinced him to cover up his bare, hairy legs.
As for how this disaster happened in the first place? Well, supposedly, the chancellor’s secretary had forgotten to send him his daily “pull up your pants” reminder. I guess we all make mistakes, which is why it’s always important to hire the proper scapegoat.