My roommate Lucie spent most of last night manically copying notes for a final today. Looking crazy-faced and muttering a little bit, she thrust at least ten pages– covered back and front– in my face, apparently expecting me to commiserate and make the whole wasting her life with anthropology work thing feel less terrible Guns of navarone the download. All I could think, though was what a waste, she’s just going to trash those notes in twelve hours, possibly even burn them in some sort of useless gesture of finality.

Irony of all ironies, Under the Button posted about their test run of GradeGuru.com that very day. The site pays for your class notes based on their user popularity and it’s possible to get up to 50 sets of notes before you even register. So while it may sound ridiculous to pay $50,000 a year only to skip class and buy a stranger’s notes, when you’re waking up at the ass crack of dawn for a core requirement, I’m pretty sure that GradeGuru will start to feel a little less reprehensible.

Though admittedly lacking in the content department, the site allows me to combine the two great loves of my life: making money and being efficient (called “lazy” in some cultures). And people like Lucie– probably lighting her study materials with a blow torch by now– with their excessive note writing can finally use that paper for something more useful than studying.