Maybe it's me.
I'm certain it's got to be just me.
When I arrive at work Monday, my classroom, though locked up
tight all weekend, smells like exhaust.
Some kind of machinery is running right outside my window. I can hear it; I just can't see it.
The heavy equipment is operating far from the building. There are men standing around in trenches
that look like future mass graves.
There's rebar everywhere. But I
cannot figure out what is causing the noise directly beyond the plexi-glass.
I cannot possibly go one more day without opening the
windows. Sometimes the smell inside
dissipates when I let air circulate, so I do what any abnormal person would
do: I open the windows despite the
clamor from the vicinity.
What I get instead of fresh air is a rush of diesel fumes so
intense that it causes people walking in the hallway to gasp.
I cannot do this.
Really, I cannot. I leave the
building most days with a headache so intense and nausea so severe that I don't
fully recover until the following Sunday evening when I've been away from the
construction for two days. I might be
able to repeat the mantra "Progress matters … progress matters…" but
today the fumes are so intense that I'm not sure I'll be coherent by homeroom
attendance.
I drag the vice principal to my room. He and I look outside, trying desperately to
figure out from where the stench is coming.
The only equipment close to my room is a set of night lights, those
huge-ass halogens, all folded up and turned off. After a little bit of detective work, we
discover that the generator for the lights is running.
Now, I'm not an overly intelligent woman, and sometimes I
lack the common sense it takes to come in out of the rain, but even I know that
the lights only need a generator when they are actually TURNED ON … which they
are not. So WTF with wasting the
taxpayers' money and my brain cells?
The VP manages to reach the site manager who instructs the
workers to shut off the generator that is blowing exhaust fumes directly in my
window, gassing us all like mass murderers on Death Row. By third period, my senses have
returned. By noontime, the weather has
finally broken, the humidity begins to lift, and it is downright pleasant in my
classroom. There are no diesel fumes, no
workers cussing, and no heavy equipment threatening to knock down the
cinderblock wall that separates me from the mud hole of progress. I'm truly fascinated watching the new school
go up inches from my windows, but I'd prefer to do it with a large part of my
cerebral cortex intact.
So here's the fun fact for today: If the job site is just
steel beams and girders right now, and the workers all break site around the
same time I do, roughly 3:30, then why do
they need the halogen lights? And why is the generator running as if someone
had been there on a Sunday night working for double-OT and never bothered to
shut it down?
Either I'm completely insane, or I've been sentenced to
Halogen Hell.
At this point, either option is viable.
Maybe it's me.
I'm just sayin'.
