A brilliant plan to rule the faculty

This week one of my committees came up with a brilliant idea that will make me rich--filthy rich, I tell you!--if only I can figure out how to make it work without inspiring multiple lawsuits. As with most committee-generated ideas, this one was constructed out of an odd conglomeration of apparently unrelated but nevertheless salient facts:

• The committee is currently organizing the annual January pedagogy workshop.
• In previous years, the committee has attempted to lure busy faculty members to workshops by presenting them with various promotional items, including tote bags, jump drives, and lanyards marked with the college's logo.
• The Special Assistant to the President and Provost (SAPP) is obsessed with ferries, particularly those serving the Seattle area, and monitors the progress of his favorite ferries on his computer desktop, where each ferry appears as a slowly-moving dot on the monitor.

Mix all these facts together on the table and what do you get? A plan to lure busy faculty members to pedagogy workshops by presenting them with spiffy new jump drives and lanyards that actually contain hidden GPS devices, allowing the SAPP to use his computer to monitor the position of all faculty members.

"We could also equip the jump drives to administer electric shocks as necessary," suggested the SAPP, a mild-mannered man in whose hands it is impossible to visualize a cattle prod. Imagine the possibilities: a faculty member says he can't attend a meeting because he has jury duty, but the GPS tracker shows that the little dot representing Dr. Delinquent is actually camped out at a local bar; administer a quick zap and watch that dot jump!

It's brilliant, I tell you. Rarely does a committee conspire to create such a universally useful plan. The trick, of course, is keeping the controls in the hands of people who can be trusted to use the system responsibly. Imagine, for instance, that you are one of several finalists for a big teaching prize and you somehow gain control of the faculty monitoring system while the prize judges are visiting your rival's class...who could resist the temptation to administer a series of well-placed shocks?

So the system would have to be kept strictly secret and the password entrusted only to a select few reliable people. Me, for instance, and possibly you--but just keep this between you and me, okay? The rest of 'em don't need to know--until they feel that first big shock.