Patrick O’Rourke, you bollocked it up again, he thought. He had adopted his mother’s way of referring to himself using his full name when he was in deepest trouble. When he was her "sweet boy," he was Paddy, but when the "hell’s spawn," it was Patrick O’Rourke. It had always sounded more impressive when she would use it on his father: Liam Michael O’Rourke. Something about having a middle name made it more ominous. His mother and father had decided early on that he would be named Patrick, but they brawled something fierce when it came to his middle name. Eventually, they decided to not decide. Paddy had felt sort of incomplete.

Here he was biding his time on a runabout, waiting for clearance to board the Grail. Incompetence seemed to follow him around. Could he really have that much bad karma? It’s one thing to occasionally stumble across someone who BSed there way through Starfleet Academy, but it’s another to see it in a ship of the line. I mean, really...he thought.

Well, it didn’t matter. He was squared away. Nothing for him to get jigged on. He clicked back to where he’d left off reading and relaxed back into his seat. Hurry up and wait had stuck again.

Teaching at Starfleet had been getting to him. They must have been desperate this last cycle to admit some of the true idiots of the galaxy into the Academy. Paddy’s last day of class he’d been asked one of the stupidest questions he’d ever heard in his entire life and he made up his mind right then to accept the transfer to the Grail, despite the fact that he would probably never see the Alpha Quadrant again.

Better to die amongst other like-minded people than the Truly Stupid....

I’m just a peasant in the Big Shitty.