I had made a judgement error. I was a third grade student at the time, so this was not an uncommon event. What was new, however, was the scale on which I had erred. As a child, I was reluctant to tell outright lies, but I was happy to play on technicalities in the wording of a question. One of the most common questions that I heard from my parents was some variation of “Do you have any homework,” with all of the variations having that key word “have” in them.
    

My teacher did in fact assign us worksheets to take home and submit sometime in the near future, at least in theory. In reality, she was quite content to ignore a total lack of worksheets from me. So, I decided to interpret my parents question as whether I had any homework with me, at that very moment, not whether I had been assigned any. The result was that I was able to arrive home and go straight to my favorite activity: free trials of cheap, low quality computer games.
    

Near the end of the year however, my scheme broke down. I was missing something, and I thought that it was in the school. My dad, who was driving me home that day, offered to help me find it. Before I could both decline and come up with a plausible yet not technically untrue reason for doing so, he was on his way into the school, ready and eager to join the hunt for whatever it was I had lost. The first logical place for him to look was in my desk. The less than logical place for me to store my math worksheets was also in my desk, and yet, I had stuffed them all in there.
    

My dad looked in the desk. He pulled out a math worksheet. Then he pulled out a few more. Soon, my desk was empty, incomplete homework assignments littered the floor, my dad was exceptionally unhappy, and I was becoming afraid, as this was the first time that I had gotten into trouble for doing something major.
    

The result was simple, and while it was unpleasant at the time, I now realize that I could have had it a lot worse: after a car ride with my exceptionally angry father, and about the time that I had to answer to my comparably angry mother, I was instructed to do all of the worksheets that I had hidden before I could do anything fun or entertaining.