LOS ANGELES – Recent Berkeley graduate Tim Atkins was spotted arriving late to his grandmother’s funeral at his hometown church after asking his family members if the service was on Berkeley Time.
“I had to come straight from a vape sesh at my Venice Beach villa – so I assumed there was an automatic ten-minute grace period for the funeral start time, just like how it was with my Issues in Cognition class at Berkeley,” explained Atkins, after also arriving ten minutes late to said vape sesh with friends earlier in the day. “I’m sure it’s not a big deal – no one batted an eye when I was late to everything at Berkeley, whether it was lectures, discussions, house tours, friend dinners, dates, break-ups, academic probation meetings, paying my utility bills, picking my mom up from the airport, and apologizing to my friends for being late all the time. I think deep down, everyone is understanding. There needs to be grace periods for everything.”
Although Atkins was quite nonchalant about arriving late to the funeral, his relatives – who sobbed even more violently after noting his tardy entrance – did not seem to echo his sentiment.
“WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS WRONG WITH HIM????” exclaimed his mother, after Atkins whispered his question between the church pews. “You’d think he’d know that this is a damn funeral. He used to think my birthday was ten days after it actually was. He would ghost our family group chat for ten hours at a time. My husband and I have never seen anyone as chronically late as him – and he doesn’t even feel bad about it, because he assumes we all know whatever the fuck ‘Berkeley Time’ even means. He does other concerning things too, like randomly stripping and running around naked during early December, screaming bloody murder at 12AM, avoiding stepping on any emblems, and log-rolling down our residential cul-de-sac. When we sent him to Berkeley, we thought it would prepare him well for the adult world. Instead, it just made him insane. It’s frankly unacceptable.”
In the aftermath of Atkins’s inquiry, he was spotted beginning to cry ten minutes later after joining the funeral service, wiping a single pre-emptive tear from his face before properly crying at full scale another ten minutes later.