Don't be surprised if the paper was never read. I found that grading things unread wasn't particularly uncommon as I went through school. Twice in grad school I finally got the balls up to test it when I thought the instructor wasn't grading on much more than expectation. Both times in the middle of long papers I said essentially "At this point I don't expect you to be reading so the next seven pages or so of this paper are just some article I copied and pasted from DIALOG. Mostly it's here to fill out this paper to the required length for the assignment." I made sure to cite it fully so that while I could get in trouble I wouldn't be kicked out for plagiarism. Tacked on a couple pages at the end with the conclusion of my paper (and the papers were fine except that they were shorter than required) and turned it.

Both times I got decent grades without comment.

My personal best was one night with about three hours sleep followed by three nights of no sleep (too lazy to do the math). Coke (A-Cola) and Zingers* got me by.


*Zingers because I was living on campus and forced into a meal plan. If you didn't use your weekly allotment, it went away forever - no refund. So when you saw that you were going to have extra meals left, you took the a la carte equivalent and stocked up on snack foods. Zingers were always a popular choice. And I haven't had one since I left the dorms 15 years ago.

I hadn't noticed the exact time given. 41 hours.

I'm still regularly up that long for no particular reason. I was up for about 45 hours straight when we came back from Japan. Nothing even close to hallucinations (nor any on my 78 hours).

Kids these days really are wimps.

Ditto. I once, towards then end of usage, had one about bugs. To be specific those annoying little weevel bugs that infest flour and cereal (stupid older sister ate bugs TWICE). In my halucination they were crawling up the walls around my bed. They were everywhere. I tweaked out trying to get rid of them all. When I finally slept, I awoke to find my room smelling like bug spray and the rat cage was in the hallway. There was not a corpse to be seen.

During a cross country trip, my friend tried to stay in a Wal*Mart parking lot in his RV overnight and was kicked out several times by WM security. He tried at least 4 or 5 different ones in different states. No dice.

Over the years I've probably slept in the parking lots of two dozen WalMarts across the country, at least one was in a thoroughly urban area (Okalahoma City) and at none of them was I the only one doing so (I'm always in a car, not an RV but there were always plenty of RVs there).

Santa Rosa, I think, was in the news last year for forcing WalMart to stop letting RVs park in its lots or they'd ban it statutorily.

Here's an article on how free RV parking at WalMarts is having a negative impact on RV parks. It includes this paragraph including comment from a Wal-Mart spokesperson:

There is a book called Wal-Mart Locator RV Guide that lists all the Wal-Marts, has pictures and maps, and detailed driving directions. And a pamphlet that lists the 350 (out of more than 4,000) or so WalMarts that do not allow parking.

Maybe your friend had the bad luck to only try it in municipalities that have banned it.

I know one was in CA and one was in Idaho. I'm not sure about the rest. The security guard turned away a number of RVs. He said something about 9/11, if I recall the story correctly.

When was the trip?

If they banned it after 9/11, it must have been a bit delayed and short period. Lani and I road tripped to Marceline, MO, for their Walt's 100th Birthday celebration a week after 9/11 and slept at least once in a WalMart parking lot during that trip. (We went through Vegas on that drive and I have never seen the town so dead. We probably could have rented a floor of a Strip casino for $100.)

Let's see. They left Monterey in June 2005 and were gone for two weeks. Each Wal*Mart must have different rules.

I spoke to a manager at a Wal*Mart in Salinas, CA last year and he said he hadn't even heard of WM doing that.

Or it could have started later. Many "security" measures were implemented well after 9/11 while the implementers still invoked 9/11 as their excuse.