Here's another tale from my past. This one isn't so much funny as it is interesting. Two or three years ago, before I moved to Oregon, I was taking classes at another university. One of them was a beginning language class. Despite never having had any prior exposure to the language, I found myself doing very well in the class, and I'm fairly certain I was outperforming all the other students. In the final week of class there was a big test followed by the final in the subsequent week. I aced the first test and scored 98.5%. The other students were not as lucky. When the prof handed back the exams, everyone groaned, and there was a long discussion about the results. The prof didn't want to penalize everyone for one bad test, so he came up with a compromise: The final would cover the same material from the disastrous test (as opposed to everything we had studied throughout the term), and whatever score we got on the final would also replace the score we had received on the previous test. One student laughingly asked what would happen if they actually scored worse on the final (The entire class burst out laughing.), and the prof said that he would apply the higher of the two scores.
Well, that seemed pretty clear to me. I had other more challenging finals to take, so I didn't even bother showing up for the final. And I'm sure everything would have gone smoothly if not for one thing; unbeknownst to me, my professor had just been diagnosed with cancer a few days earlier. He had someone else from the department administer the final, because he had to undergo an operation that day followed by chemo. When I learned that I had astonishingly earned a C- in that class, I spoke to the departmental secretary about it. She explained that she had given the grades exactly as per the profs instructions, which she read back to me. She explained that, while it was true that that the higher of the two scores was to be applied to both, there was nothing in the instructions that said a student could miss the final. Therefore she had to give me a big fat zero on the final, which to me would seem to contradict the instructions she had been given.
The secretary promised to speak to the professor the next time he was in the office. I checked in with her every few days after that to see if she had seen him and spoken to him. Sometimes she would say he had been in, but she never seemed to remember with any certainty if she had actually spoken to him about my grade or what he had said. Normally, I would have made an effort to contact the professor directly, but, since he was dying of cancer, I really didn't feel it would be appropriate to bother him. Also, he had a reputation for being an extremely private person to the point that it was a running joke in the department that none of his colleagues even knew where he lived. Anyway, I eventually gave up trying to get anything out of the secretary, but I was optimistic that the situation would eventually be resolved.
A few months later, I saw my prof's obituary in the paper. My grade still hadn't been changed, and I doubt it ever will be. Having a C- on my transcript in a 101 language course is quite embarrassing, but it makes for an interesting story. A lot of people complain about receiving unfair grades, but I've never heard as airtight a case as mine.