WHY THAT RANDOM GUY HAS A SEVERE CASE OF CARRIAGE-ASS

I detest grocery shopping.

To be fair, I detest all kinds of shopping, but I really hate grocery shopping, which is why I will either shop after work when the store is only semi-busy, or I will shop with my pal Jess so we can laugh our asses off at people who ask for “polished ham” (Polish ham) or “laugh out loud cheese”  (Land O’ Lakes, aka LOL cheese). 

Today I am alone, fighting the other shoppers, including three teenaged boys who are sort of with a young woman but mostly wilding all over the store like idiots.  I run into their antics no less than five times in my travels.  I also have to fight the displays, which, for some unknown reason, are always set up strategically to block entire aisles.  Lastly, the grocery clerks are restocking, and it’s not like the old days when workers actually worked.  These clerks are four-deep stocking, chatting, joking, leaving their ladders and pallets everywhere, and playing with their cell phones.  In other words, people I want to drop-kick.

I finally finish my shopping, which consists mostly of fruits and vegetables because I’m on a health kick, and paper goods because one can never have too much toilet paper (though one certainly can have too little).  I now enter what I refer to as the Aggravation Zone:  the check-out lines. 

First, let me admit right up front that I should probably have a sign on my back whenever I enter a store.  This sign should read, “IF YOU ARE STANDING BEHIND ME, YOU ARE PROBABLY IN THE WRONG LINE.”  I have a knack for getting behind people who are counting out 3,000 pennies to pay, or who have items with no prices or tags, or whose children are blowing snot in every direction, or who haven’t showered in weeks, or who question every single price on every single can and every single box.  I am notoriously unlucky in store check-out line choices.

Today, though, I find a line that’s almost done, and I put my stuff up onto the conveyor belt.  The scanner works, the cashier knows how to weigh produce, and the sacker (an older gentleman) knows how to pack bags so I don’t have to be a weightlifter to carry them.  SCORE!  The woman behind me has several kids, but they don’t crowd me, cough on me, nor puke on my shoes.  SCORE AGAIN!  In no time, my carriage is loaded up with bags, and I’m sailing out of the store.

This could be the day I get home in a reasonable amount of time.  Until …  until the other shopper cuts in front of me just as I am nearing the door. 

I don’t give this maneuver much thought.  I mean, seriously, the guy pushing the carriage is about my age.  He seems to be as intent on leaving this damn place as am I.  He probably hates shopping as much as I do.  I’m booking it along behind him, and we make it through the first door without a hitch.  Then … then …

Suddenly … he stops.  Just as we reach the second door, just as I am about to break loose and hit the open sidewalk, just as I am home-free, he freaking stops to throw something in the trash can, blocking me in the limbo that is the inner sanctum between automatic doors.  He doesn’t bother with the trashcan that’s right outside the final door nor the trashcan that is inside the store by the first door.  No, he desperately wants to throw his paper list into this particular trashcan because, hey, why not – who the frig cares if there are people behind him!

And this, folks, this is where the guy nearly gets a free proctol exam, courtesy of my shopping carriage.  I have so much momentum and so many groceries that a quick stop is nearly impossible.  The front of the metal vehicle I am commandeering screeches to a halt mere inches from the asshole’s asshole.

I should have known.  I should have seen this coming.  After all, I have zero trauma at the check-out.  I cannot possibly be so naïve as to believe that my shopping luck has changed.  Karma is not my friend, and I need to accept this and embrace the irony that is my life.

So, I am going to make a new sign for the next time I go shopping:  “IF YOU ARE IN FRONT OF ME AND DECIDE TO STOP YOUR CART, I AM GOING TO GIVE YOU A SEVERE CASE OF CARRIAGE-ASS.”  So there!  Stick that next to your polished ham and your laugh-out-loud cheese.

THE COPY LADY AND WHY I LOVE HER

I love the copy lady.  No, really, I do.  She comes in a couple of times a week for a few months every school year, and she does copying for us.  She saves me valuable time by doing the fighting with jammed machines while I can actually get work done in my classroom.  Love her.

Today, though, I don’t know what the heck happens to her. 

I have everything that I need to have copied all ready to go.  I carefully print out little instruction papers – hole-punch this, single-side that, 100 copies of this … -- and attach each carefully documented instruction sheet to each original.  Every time I do this, I pray to the copy gods that the originals do not get lost or ruined or messed up somehow.  And usually this is a successful strategy.

Usually.

Unfortunately, our printers now have remote-copy access, which means that our printing jobs can be and often are interrupted by people blindly sending jobs from their desk computers.  This would be a great system if their jobs didn’t bump off the jobs of people actually in the copy room using the machines.

This simple glitch sends the copy lady into a frenzy today, and somehow she manages to take four copies of one of my jobs, and she reassigns them into the to-be-copied pile, assuming they are new jobs of some kind. 

When I go to pick up my box of copies, I realize it is heavier than I expected.  It isn’t until I start separating the copies into piles that I realize I have not 100, not 200, not 300, but 700 copies of a graphic organizer for the students to use.  700.  That’s almost a ream and a half of paper just for this one document.

The good news is that I might very well manage to use most of these organizers during the year, and, if not, I can always use them next year.  And the year after that.  And probably even the year after that, and the next year, and probably even another year, to boot.

I do love the copy lady.  She’s so good that she apparently got some of my copying caught up through my next license renewal cycle.  Seriously, though, without her, my life would be infinitely more frustrating, as she is really patient with the jammed machines.  I just kick them.  It may not unjam the works, but it sure does make me feel better.

Now if I can just get over the guilt of having her work extra-hard on my copy job that probably took her an hour longer than necessary of absolutely unnecessary work, I might feel better about this blog entry.

MMMMKAY

I have to attend a presentation today.  It’s the kind of presentation I detest: someone in education who claims to know better than classroom teachers, and who only knows how to read off his own Powerpoint without making any actual talking points.

Look, guy, I can read.  No, really.  I’m not shitting you, truly, I … can … read.

This poor man tries hard to get the audience engaged, but the presentation is dry.  Wicked dry.  Like toddler teething biscuits dry.  Worse, he sounds and looks exactly like Mr. Garrison from South Park.  All he needs is Mr. Hat, the creepy hand puppet, and the transformation will be complete.  Seriously, this guy even says “Mmmmkay.”

Needless to say, by the time I arrive home, I am completely stir-crazy from sitting still in two different hour-long meetings this afternoon.  I immediately change into workout gear and do a couple of circuits of arms, legs, and abs.  I feel a little better, but I’m still out of sorts, kind of agitated, somewhat pissed off, and generally in a semi-foul mood.  I try working the weights a bit, but it’s not helping much.

I need to hit something.

I have been debating buying one of those punching dummies, but, for now, I set up a thick, foldable mat that I jury-rig into a decent punching bag.  I put on my cheapo fingerless, wrist wrap bag gloves and give it a go.  For fifteen straight minutes.  Sometimes superimposing faces where my fists are connecting with foam. 

I decide to call it a day after this, mostly because I’m exhausting myself and a little bit because I’m hungry for dinner.  The main reason I stop punching, though, is because I feel better.  I truly do feel better after pummeling something with my fists (which only works because the mat cannot punch me back).

Besides, this all helps me to channel my agida, which is wicked important with a temper as short as mine is.

Mmmmkay?

THE ADVENTURES OF SCIENCE DUDE

(What it looked like in August)

Sometimes I go to lunch in the school cafeteria and sometimes I stay in my classroom.  I eat; I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not starving myself.  It’s just that the school configuration means I walk a very long way to the lunch room, and I only have twenty-two minutes including hall duty time, which brings it down to about seventeen minutes.  Taking five total minutes to walk to and from the caf almost seems like wasted time.

Plus, it has been too flipping cold to leave the warmth of my classroom.  Sometimes it’s nice to sit and enjoy the peace, the quiet, and the temperature above fifty-five degrees.  It is this occurrence that brings a colleague to my classroom. 

Years ago when I taught the same grade level this guy does, we had rooms separated by the home economics classroom.  He would sneak through that connecting room, lurk between stoves, silently open my side door, and blast an air horn into my room.  Then he would run away. 

Good times, actually.

We are in a different building now.  My room is in the same wing as the offices of both the superintendent and the assistant superintendent, so this part of the school sees a lot of visitors.  This colleague, a grade eight science teacher, happens to be visiting the super’s office when he hears the tap-tap-tap of my computer keyboard echoing down the deserted seventh grade hallway.  These days, though, it’s almost impossible for him to sneak up on me because he broke his foot and has it in a cast-boot.  I can hear him kerplunking down the hall long before he sticks his head into my open doorway.

SCIENCE DUDE:  I thought I heard someone typing away down here.

ME:  Yup, I’m typing my blog.  I don’t have time to do it later.

SCIENCE DUDE:  You have a blog?

(I’m reasonably certain he’s heard this fact before.)

ME:  Yup.

SCIENCE DUDE:  How often do you write your blog?

ME:  Every day.  Every damn day for more than two years.

SCIENCE DUDE:  A professional blog?

ME:  It’s as unprofessional as it gets.

SCIENCE DUDE:  Do you ever write about school?

ME:  (pausing … he is the union president, after all)  Um … sometimes.

(SCIENCE DUDE ponders this for a moment.)

ME:  But I write under a pseudonym. 

(SCIENCE DUDE nods slowly.  I’m hoping he knows what a pseudonym is and doesn’t think I have some sort of mental disorder, as if that isn’t obvious enough by my choices of writing topics.)

SCIENCE DUDE:  Do you write about the people you work with?

ME:  Sometimes.

(SCIENCE DUDE digests this while tilting his head slightly at an angle.)

SCIENCE DUDE:  Have you ever written about me?

(I break into a very broad and somewhat evil grin.)

ME:  I will now.

Truth is, I probably have mentioned this teacher before.  He’s the guy we invite to dive bars where he orders fru-fru girlie drinks with umbrellas and fruit in them.  I may or may not have related the story of how when he first broke his foot he needed a wheelchair to get up our 400-yard long ramp between wings.  The ramp is about a sixty-degree gradient from bottom to top, and he didn’t have the stamina to wheel himself up the whole ramp, so I got a running start and pushed him to the top myself. 

No biggie. 

I used to do judo.  I carried men on my back and in my arms and dragged them up and down mats as exercise, men who were heavier than I was because I only weighed about 112 pounds.  Back then.  I weigh more now, so I figured I should be able to carry, drag, and push this guy and his chair up the ramp with little problem, despite my Achilles tendonitis and lack of recent weight training.

I am happy to report that SCIENCE DUDE did not hurtle back down the ramp to oblivion, and I did manage to push him to the top of the ramp.  I’m also happy to report that he no longer even needs crutches, so he calumphs loudly down the hallway, unable to sneak up on anybody.

But, mostly, I am super-elated to report that SCIENCE DUDE has officially made the blog, with his very own entry… which he will probably never read … because he’ll be too busy plotting a way to get me back for writing this and letting the world know he drinks fru-fru drinks.

It’s okay.  I can always hide in the caf at lunch, and, for a few more weeks, anyway, I can outrun the gimpy SCIENCE DUDE, if necessary.