I work in a university, and one of my duties is to go into the archives to dig up old student records. Today I stumbled across a letter, part of an exchange between two university departments in the early 80s. The details were about a student's medical history so I won't go into them, but the letter began "How wonderful to receive another token of your esteem. If my enemies wished to destroy me, all they would have to do is label the bomb as coming from your department." I don't even think it was sarcastic. Why did we ever stop greeting each other like this?
Today's accidental archive find: an external examiner's preliminary report on a PhD student's thesis, listing at least a dozen places where the student has extensively plagiarised the examiner's work and very politely asking what the university's policy on plagiarism is.
If I remember right, when I did my PhD I had my examiner confirmed 2-3 months before the viva. So that's 2-3 months of the student learning that (one of) the guy(s) they stole from is going to be marking their work, and dying a thousand deaths every day until the viva. I can't stop thinking about this. Absolutely mortifying. Kind of funny, though.