Welcome to Wednesday One Shots, the bi-weekly series where we share a bonus story with you in the

middle of the week. Before we get started, I just wanted to remind you all about our live stream

episode this Saturday, November 1st at 7 p.m. Pacific over at Twitch.tv slash Cryptic County.

I'll be joined by a bunch of our podcast friends and we'll all be telling stories on video

and it will be live streamed and don't worry if you happen to miss it or you can't make it.

The audio versions will be available in the following week's episode. I hope to see you there

though. These are always a lot of fun. This week we have a story by Donna titled, Can I Spill the Beans Now?

Decades ago, I was in college studying a few different courses, including journalism. I was nervous

about taking this program, and I didn't know anyone in the class.

Once I started, though, it was nice to be in a room with other people like me.

Everyone was creative, the writer types.

So, I made friends, including one who would go on to be my child's godparent later down the line.

The journalism teacher was a really difficult marker. If he found one spelling or grammar error, he would fail an entire article. And even worse,

he would write a jaunty little jab like, Cheers, you fail.

It was tough,

but it became all of our goal one day

to get the loftly perch

of having no errors in his eyes.

We dared to dream.

Anyway, the way the course worked

was that at any point during the day, the journalism teacher would show up to assign a story to us.

We grew to dread seeing his curly hair bobbing as he walked through the classroom door, since we knew that our evenings were about to be consumed by an assignment.

...