CV Cee: The Office Closet
On day two of Mom’s closet clean out, the action shifts to the office.
The office, formerly the place where my sister ‘Nita and I fought when she wore my absolute favorite sheer pink blouse to school and denied it (the armpits don’t lie!). Where I used to confess an undying preteen-aged love for Darryl (until Rhonda stole my diary). The place where Sharon would push the last button on my last nerve and make me flirt with the concept of sororicide.
Now, that place is Mom’s office. But the office closet never got word of its new assignment. It’s stuck in the time of prom dresses and graduation gowns. Manual typewriters and slide light boxes. Continental Airlines-branded overcoats and “you did it” signs. Opening that closet is like looking at a three-dimensional timeline of a family’s growth and evolution.
Again, my aide de camp is Zasia.
Today we’ve assembled three extra large moving boxes: one for clothing, one for equipment and the third for trash.
The first thing I pull out sets me square on memory lane. “Wow, this was my eighth grade graduation dress!”
The sleeveless, white lace dress, trimmed with tiny rhinestones and accented with a flesh-toned insert at the waist, was gorgeous when I danced in it atop The Whiting Restaurant’s tables on graduation night. Today it is yellowed and dirtied with cobwebs. Trash.
Looking at that closet wore me out….
Old raincoats, whose fabric has fused, joins the dress, along with one of daddy’s old corduroy jackets — the ones with the leather patches on the sleeves. Lots of Mom’s stuff that no longer fits.
The deeper we go, the further back in time I travel. This could take a while.
“This was your mom’s high school prom dress.” I say to Zasia, tossing her a printed voile halter dress with ruffled bottom and oversized lace-trimmed collar.
Reaching inside a plastic shopping bag I pull out hats. Easily a dozen stretch velvet caps in an assortment of colors. “Zasia, I found more hats!”
“More? Seriously! I don’t know if there’s enough room in the box…” her voice trails off as she takes the hats to the living room staging area.
“We found more hats!” she announces as she tucks hats into corners of the box.
Old shirts. Older pants. A wheelchair cushion. An assortment of three-footed canes and a walker. A box of 35mm slides and a light box. Leisure suits. Ten robes, most with the tags still on them. Outerwear. Kev’s clothes. My clothes. Anita’s clothes. Sharon’s clothes… did we throw anything away?
Sweat rolls down my face, the salt stinging my eyes. Why didn’t I wear a bandana—what was I thinking?
After all that hard work, I’d give anything to be on a beach….
There was stuff in that closet I hadn’t seen or thought of in decades. Some brought tears to my eyes: Daddy’s sketchbooks. One of his prosthetic legs. His assortment of wheelchair bags.
A fourth box—for shoes and accessories, is assembled and staged in the hallway, bringing the total number boxes stationed about the house to seven. In no time, we fill it with shoes, old luggage, bags and purses.
“There’s a lot of stuff here,” Zasia announces to no one in particular. “Grandma, do you know we have filled four — no — six boxes and we haven’t finished?”
“Really? So what are you giving away?”
“A whole lot of stuff… lots of old bags and clothes. A typewriter from when Auntie Cyndi was a reporter. Uncle Kev’s Boy Scout vest—Auntie Cyndi said he almost made it to Eagle Scout. Shoes. Old luggage… a lot of stuff that was taking up room in your closet.”
“Oh,” Mom says. “It’s been so long since my headlights burned out. I can’t imagine what is in those closets now.”
“A lot of stuff, Grandma. Trust me.”
At last we’ve reached the end of the closet. We’ve added a fourth box, to accommodate the overflow of clothes.
“Wow, Mom,” I say. Fanning myself with another old hat. “This is hard work. But we’re finished and ready for Amvets. When did you say they were coming?”
“April 18th.”
“Well, they should count themselves lucky ‘cause they are getting a whole lot of stuff that can be sold. If we—no, ‘I’—had the time, we could sell this on eBay. But that’s a whole lotta stuff to be tryin’ to sell. Better to take the tax deduction….”
Yeah, the tax deduction would be better. Except it was not to be.
Somehow the wires got crossed, and April18 came and went without an Amvets visit.
Now the living room and hallway are jammed with extra large boxes of goods we want to donate, but can’t. My aide de camp and I are spent.
“You know, we have to call Amvets to come back and pick this stuff up,” Zasia announces as we survey the landscape of boxes. “Maybe we could sell some of this stuff on eBay.”
The thought of writing descriptions wearies me to the bone. “Grab a box,” I say to Zasia. “Let’s take this to the Goodwill collection box around the corner.”
And just like that, the 2012 closet clean up comes to an end.
The days I spent at Mom’s had taken a toll on the progress of my own closet cleanout. Pissed that I was devoting all my attention to a few interlopers, my closets staged a strike, refusing to accept even one more blouse. It was going to take a whole lot of weeding out to get on good terms with my closets after this little episode.
See what happens when you try to do good?
Editor’s Note: CV’s last post for The Third City was A Box of Hats….
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Grabowski: The Cheapskate Millionaire
Melvin, whose name I have changed to protect his identity, was my boss and the owner of a three-man company based in a south-side warehouse. We shared a small, box of an office that had a thin and worn carpet, drop ceiling, and wood panel walls.
The business was plastics. We bought 55-gallon drums of epoxy, urethane, silicone and polyester resins that our shipping clerk repackaged into smaller sizes for resale.
The uses of our products were many and our customers diverse, including a now-famous chef who made a custom-cooking device that now sits in the Smithsonian; researchers making prototype prosthetic limbs; the team that hand-made the replica of Sue’s bones at the Field Museum; Eastern European immigrants using their old world craftsmanship to sculpt detailed fireplace mantles in plaster; fine French chocolatiers; MFA students at the Art Institute; the Chicago company that manufactures the Oscars; and many others.
Grey-haired. Pouty-faced. Gangly. These words alone are enough to describe Melvin’s physical appearance.
And although a photograph would support this description, it does nothing to portray his peculiar behavior. For this, I need another thousand words, drawn from my memory of the three years I worked there.
To say that he was cheap would be an understatement. Melvin was a penny-pinching miser that made Ebenezer Scrooge look generous. And I’m not just trying to be sensationalist. I am saying this because it is true.
He’s sort of like Melvin in that movie about Howard Hughes….
In all fairness, Melvin started his business in the `70s, and, in his own words, said they lived “hand to mouth.”
Back in those days, they didn’t have enough money to pay the utilities, so in the winter, he sat shivering at his desk in the dark with no heat, bundled up trying to make sales.
One afternoon shortly after I had started working there, I saw him spit his gum back into a wrapper and stick it in his top desk drawer. When I asked him about it, he said he usually chewed the same piece for two or three days.
To get more bang for his buck, he would eat an apple, including the core and seeds, and with bananas he ate the peel. All of this, presumably, because then he wouldn’t need to buy as much food.
Think about that — all those perfectly good calories that you waste.
He commuted on a motorcycle because it used less gas, and he would pull over to pick up loose change as small as a penny. Or so he said.
Additionally, Melvin was an avid garbage picker.
“It got to the point where people in my neighborhood would see me coming down the alley and hand me bags of clothes and house wares,” he told me. “I’ve probably saved myself at least $20,000 from all the things I have found for free.”
All of our company’s office supplies were garbage picked from a nearby dollar store that he frequented.
If Melvin couldn’t find it in the trash, we weren’t getting it.
He made Scrooge look generous….
He also used to battle with Fed Ex over our bills and would literally spend hours scrutinizing each line looking for errors. If he found one — and found many — he would short pay the bills by anywhere from fifty cents to fifteen dollars.
“Hey, Melvin,” I once asked. “Don’t you think your time would be better spent trying to get us some new customers?”
“It’s the principle of the thing, they’re just trying to squeeze me out of my hard earned cash,” he responded.
One day when Melvin happened to be out of the office, I noticed some company financial reports lying on a desk.
Hmmmm, should I have a look?
After all, I was considering purchasing the business from him since he wanted to retire, and it would help if I knew the numbers.
I opened it up.
And then I gasped in disbelief as my jaw dropped.
He and his wife – his wife who only worked one afternoon a week – were paying themselves a combined salary…of more than $200,000 per year!
They were raking it in, and because their mortgage was paid off and they barely bought anything and never took a vacation, they must have been millionaires several times over!
And they certainly were not very generous with it. In all my time of working there, they never even once ordered us pizza for lunch.
Melvin is, however, very active in his church, and I suspect that someday, when he passes away, we will read about a sizable donation — probably upwards of $10 million — he made to them.
There are two more examples of his cheapness that I just have to share, and then I’m done.
He had this ratty brown leather jacket that was the only jacket I ever saw him wear, and I’m pretty sure he found it in the trash.
He arrived to work one morning with the widest, longest-lasting grin I’d ever seen on his face.
Without saying a word, he laid his jacket on the floor, unrolled a piece of fabric and zipped it in.
He chuckled, “I can’t believe it, after years of searching, I have finally found a lining that fits my jacket.”
Indeed — unbelievable.
And finally, sharing an office for three years, we engaged in a wide variety of conversations, including one about our facial shaving habits.
“I can only use a razor three or four times before it dulls and then I have to throw it away,” I once told him.
Melvin claimed he could go at least a month on the same blade.
Well, I ended up leaving the company for a better job selling industrial gas like argon and nitrogen. Six months after leaving Melvin, I received the following email from him….
Just thought you would like to know that I put in a new blade in my Trac II this morning. The last time I put in a new blade was 3/17/03 and it lasted until 3/31/04. Aren’t you proud of me??? Guinness Book of Records here I come!
No wonder he always had little nicks and dried blood splotches on his face!
So, if you ever see a skinny, frowning man picking through your trash, you may have just spotted Melvin the multi-millionaire, living happily in retirement.
Editor’s Note: Grabowski‘s last post for The Third City was My Friend Mike….
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CV Cee: A Box of Hats
Now that I have free time on my hands, having been handed a pink slip after 13 years on the job, I’ve taken to closet cleaning.
First mine, ‘cause Michael’s always cracking that I never throw anything away. Then my Mom’s, because she hasn’t thrown anything away since losing her sight in 1992.
In the 20 years since, whenever my sisters and I undertook a cleaning, Mom insisted on knowing what we were discarding. Sometimes that wasn’t always feasible. More than once it turned a job few wanted to do to begin with into a bigger, excruciatingly slow and sometimes-unproductive production.
The impetus for this latest closet clean out was Amvets: they were coming by for their bi-annual pick up in a week and I didn’t want them to leave empty-handed. Because we had five closets to do, I enlisted my niece, Zasia, partially unemployed at the time, to assist.
We decided to start with Mom’s hat collection. This was going to be more like an intervention, and I needed back up.
Mom is a hat hoarder.
She came by this trait honestly, as her mother was a hat hoarder. No outfit was complete without a hat, or three, to “top it off.” The last time anyone attempted an intervention was four years ago, when my sister Anita implemented the plastic bin storage system.
Like weeds after a good rain, her collection had overrun the storage system. Now, boxes, bins and bags with Mom’s crowns were piled high atop each other on the chest of drawers, on top of the storage containers, the bookcase… in short, Mom’s room had been taken over by hats.
Great hats, Part I….
We brought all the bins, boxes and bags of hats into the living room. With Zasia and mom on the love seat, the hats and I on the couch, we got started.
Ugly hats were first to go. As the youngest and hippest one in the room, Zasia became the default arbiter of ugly, with Patricia and I weighing in as necessary. Hat so ugly they were YOU-gly, woven micro fiber, fake straw hats. Gone! Six hats hit the bricks.
“Mom, here’s one, two, three, four…. eight hats whose feathers have fallen off,” I say by way of justification. “They’ve got to go.”
“What color are they?”
“Ummm, three white—remember the white wool one with the brown feathers? Feel it. Yeah, that one. A black and a red wool one, tan, green, brown.” One box emptied.
“Okay.”
In another box I find a bunch of caps and berets made of leather so old it crackled. Some of the hats I remember mom wearing when she could see.
“Ugly, ugly and mo’ ugly,” I proclaim, tossing the lot of them into the Amvets box. “Mom, say goodbye to the leather cap era.” They land in the box with a thud.
Great hats, Part II….
“What are these, adult bonnets?” Zasia cracks as she pulls a nested group of assorted color cotton caps with oversized baby-bonnet-style brims out of another bag. “Oooooohhh, Grandma, where did you get these hats? They don’t even look like your style! Oh, these are ugly!”
“Let me feel them.” Zasia hands her a cap. “Oh, I think your mother bought me these one time when I was in Florida.”
“Note to self: tell mom not to buy you anymore ugly hats. Grandma, they gotta go!”
“Alright, then. Give them away.”
And so it went. Box after bag after bin. Wool caps. Straw hats. Knits and fake furs. Once-cute little saucers made to sit askance on the head. Hats decorated with organza and tulle, netting and sequins, beads and feathers…. oh, the feathers. Baseball caps. Beanies, berets, bowlers. Cloches and cowboys, fedoras and floppies. Newsboys, panamas, porkpies. So many hats we’d stopped counting.
Two hours pass. Finally we reach the end of the lot. We have filled an extra large moving box. With hats. Hats! Unbelievable.
“I have never, ever, seen so many hats!” Zasia says, surveying our work. “Nobody would believe me if I told them. I’m going to tweet this.” She snaps a picture of the box, which literally is filled with hats. “We filled this moving box with hats after our hat intervention with Grandma!” read the caption.
We’ve winnowed Mom’s hat collection to two plastic bins and three boxes. We decide that she needs a hat stand because contributing to this debacle is that no one can see what color/style hats she has, so we keep buying more of the same, thereby perpetuating the hoarding cycle.
Now we just have to find a place to put the hat stand. Guess that means the office closet is next…
Editor’s Note: CV‘s last post for The Third City was The Bull in the China Shop….
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Sol.: Wash Your Hands!
As healthcare workers, we’re conditioned to wash or sanitize our hands before and after coming into contact with patients, every time, without fail.
To make this as easy as possible to do, there are little hand sanitizer dispensers placed everywhere in our ER. You can’t walk 5 feet without coming across one. There are also sinks located in every room and at various locations throughout the ER.
I wash or sanitize my hands at least 30 to 40 times a day. It’s a pain in the ass, but you gotta do it. And with all the dispensers and sinks everywhere, it’s easy to do.
So it’s pretty hard to come up with an excuse for not keeping your hands clean. But there are some folks — yes, even people in my own department–that don’t take it as serious as the rest of us do.
It’s easy to spot them. They’ll come out of a patient’s room and go straight to a computer and begin charting in a patient’s chart. Or they’ll come out, walk right past a hand sanitizer dispenser and carry on about their business.
Now, I’m not one to judge. You want to have nasty hands? That’s your own business. Just don’t touch me with them and we’ll be fine.
But the other day I was forced to say something to one of the Docs, who we’ll call Dr. Wigglesworth.
I was sitting in our break room, eating my dinner, watching Sportscenter on TV.
When you’re done, wash your hands!
Let me stop here for a brief explanation.
Whoever designed our break room is either a complete idiot, or lacks awareness of potentially awkward situations.
I say this because our employee bathroom is also in the break room, less then a foot away from the table we all eat at. So as you can imagine, if I’m sitting at the table eating, I am able to hear everything that goes on in the bathroom. And I mean everything.
So I’m eating….
In comes Dr. Wigglesworth.
“Hey, how’s it going, Sol.?”
“Good, Doc. Just eating.”
“Whatcha got there?”
“Chicken tenders and onion rings. Want some?”
“Yeah. Don’t mind if I do. Let me hit the John first.”
I hope this kid washes his hands before he eats….
He goes into the bathroom, locks door and proceeds to take a very, very long pee. I hear him let out a deep grunt and then he flushes the toilet.
There’s a brief pause before the door flings open.
Now I wasn’t eavesdropping, but I couldn’t help but notice I hadn’t heard the water running, nor did I hear the automatic paper towel dispenser go off.
But before what all that meant could register, he reached over my shoulder and grabbed a chicken tender that he split in half. He then threw the other half back onto the pile of onion rings and tenders on my plate.
“What the hell are you doing?” I exclaimed.
“What?” he asked, his mouth full as he chomped on half a chicken tender. “You said I could have some.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t wash your hands. And now you contaminated my food by throwing that half you touched back on it.”
“I washed my hands,” he said defensively.
“No you didn’t. You took a piss, grunted like a goddamn caveman and came right out. What kind of a sicko does that shit?”
“So you’re eavesdropping on me taking a piss, now? Who’s the sicko?”
“You can’t help but to hear everything — you’re a fucking foot away from the table with nothing but a door and four thin walls to separate us.”
“Well, your hearing must be bad cause I washed my hands. I always wash my hands, I’m a physician for Christ’s sake.”
“No you did not. I can’t eat this shit now. You took your penis hands and touched my food and now I have penis-laced chicken tenders and onion rings.”
“Do whatever you goddamn want, you fool,” he said as he stormed out of the break room.
I took my plate and tossed it in the trash. I wasn’t going to eat penis chicken because he didn’t know how to wash his hands.
Editor’s Note: Sol.’s last post for The Third City was Sex Machine….
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Jim Siergey: Who is Tony Stark?
I’ve never been much of a social butterfly. My mingling skills are minuscule and I’m laughable when trying to be affable
I find being around a large crowd of people to be unbearable, especially if I don’t know most of them. When one of those unknown entities tries to get to know me, I get the heebie-jeebies.
Perhaps it’s my Eastern European genes that make me reluctant to divulge personal information. Paranoia strikes deep…especially when your ancestors come from police states.
I used to tell people that I sold insurance. That would keep them away.
My pathetic modus operandi for social events was to hang around for a while, try to be invisible and then wordlessly slink away. I didn’t always but sometimes I had good reason to do so.
Once, many years ago, I went to a gathering of cartoonists, pretending that I’d have the ability to schmooze—the fever dreams of a committed loner.
The place was jam-packed. I knew a couple of people there but the majority of cartoonists in attendance worked in the super hero genre of comic books. It’s a genre I knew very little of and had little interest in but could still admire the artistry and talent it took to produce these action-packed spandex-clad illustrations.
Can you tell the difference?
I hung around for a while in my usual mute way, contemplating when my departure should take place when I was suddenly confronted by one of the guests.
He was a portly, bearded fellow clad in a plaid shirt. He appeared to be rather excited about something.
“Hey! Do you know who you look like?” he bellowed, although he stood only inches from me.
I responded the only way that I could, negatively.
“No.” I said.
“Tony Stark!” he shrieked.
I responded with a blank stare.
“You know who Tony Stark is, don’t you?” he continued.
Thinking that perhaps Tony Stark was some well-known cartoonist and someone who might even be at this gathering, I didn’t wish to display my ignorance so, thinking quickly, I responded with an indecipherable mumble.
These days, Jim looks a little like this….
The loud fellow then clued me in, “IRON MAN!” he roared. “He’s IRON MAN!”
Fortunately, my friend who accompanied me there (and may even have induced me to attend, now that I think of it) noticed the puddle that was developing around me due to my huge beads of flop sweat.
“Uh, Jim,” he said. “I need your help in getting something out of the car.”
We were through the door in an instant and back out into the blessed solitude of the street.
While in the car, she turned to me and said, “You know, you DO sort of look like Tony Stark.”
Editor’s Note: Jim‘s last post for The Third City was Clothes Call….
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Katie Helde: The Dangers of Autopilot
Part 1: Showers of Sparks
I cringe to start a story with the phrase “when I was growing up,” because sounding cliché right off the bat is like showing up to a cocktail party with sweatpants and coffee breath. It’s a bad move.
But I’ve decided to do it, anyway, because, who knows? Maybe everyone else at said cocktail party is feeling constricted and uncomfortable in their wardrobe choices.
Just to clarify–because the sweatsuit has somehow become a fashion item marketed for its sex appeal– the sweatpants that I’m referring to are the old-school kind; The Look that says, “I’ve been on the couch watching hours of paternity tests on Maury:”
“Why, thank you for inviting me. Two questions: are there hors-deuvres? And, where’s the TV? We’re about to find out if Deshawn is the father.”
To be sure, nobody else at said cocktail party is wearing sweats, but maybe the other ladies’ heels are giving them bunions, and their gowns are backless, so they can’t wear a bra, but they forgot to buy a bra-alternative, like those pedal things that somehow rest on top of your boob and stay there, so instead they’re wearing band-aids on their nipples to keep them from nipping –all because they feel socially pressured to do so.
There they are, hobbling about, feet bunioned, boobs band-aided; and suddenly, I waltz in, with my cotton clothes and my Doctor-Scholl’s-lined-slippers. Maybe everybody else will see how happy I am, and they’ll change into comfier clothes.
* * *
When I was growing up, my family celebrated the Fourth of July on the sandy shores of Lake Michigan. There, surrounded by aunts, uncles, and cousins, I would gaze up at the dazzling light show created by the fireworks above –fireworks that other families had bought.
To be sure, my family provided fireworks of our own. These puppies, however, weren’t fireworks per say, as much as they were a rag-taggle set of cardboard firecrackers, and they sure as heck never left the ground. They were those showers of sparks that come in a plastic-wrapped variety pack on the side of the Wisconsin interstate.
Part of the excitement of roadside firework stands is that
they often have the design of a murderer’s torture hut. What awaits you inside?
Great bargains and fond family memories? Or a grizzly death? Come find out!
As a child, I maintained high hopes for our fireworks. I wanted the other vacationers on the beach to say, “gee, that family’s fireworks make me as impressed as I am envious!”
At a shack on the side of the road, my nine-year-old self would persuade my mother to buy the package that cost $17.99 instead of the measly fifteen dollar alternative; I was convinced that those three dollars were the key difference between a sky-high success and -for lack of a better term–a firework shit-show.
In truth, items bought along the Wisconsin interstate rarely amount to success, and the other families had fireworks from places like Tennessee, where people barbecue their breakfast and sit on porch roofs, drinking beer without a shirt on. Of course those fireworks were going to be cooler than ours!
A Depiction of what the author can only assume to be
an average Tuesday at a Tennessee Public Library:
It should be noted that the author has never set foot in the state of Tennessee,
nor does she know anyone from Tennessee, nor has she done any research about Tennessee.
Our fireworks came from the upper-Midwest, where people are dairy farmers and still believe in unions and care about things like general public safety. Talk about boring.
So there, on the beach, framed by Tennessee party-works, our little engines that couldn’t sputtered out sparks from the ground. Each time we lit a new one (and by that, I mean, a shower of sparks that was essentially identical to the last), the utter inadequacy of our fireworks would become more and more apparent.
Indeed, it seemed that the inherent lameness of our fireworks would begin to dawn on the firecrackers themselves, and, as if in an attempt to compensate for their small visibility, they would start to make loud screeching sounds. It was as if the showers of sparks were bemoaning their low-status in the firework hierarchy. As we covered our ears, they would cry out with self-shame –like the wailing of harpies in Dante’s Inferno.
And thus, upon entering Hell’s gate, Virgil warned Dante,
“beware the showers of sparks; for they be as tacky as
those sweatpants that Peter wore to the Last Supper”
Now that I’ve successfully thrown in an allusion to classic literature, I can move on to the more low-brow components of my story; i.e. tinkling. For it was at one such Fourth of July that I had to go to the bathroom. I was probably eleven.
Of course, at the beach, the sand is your oyster, and I used it for everything from making castles, to sunbathing, to creating makeshift tinkle-areas behind the dunegrass.
In this way, needing to pee while on the beach brought little anxiety for me. Plus, our showers of sparks were shrieking like banshees, so I knew that my family would neither see nor hear me pee several feet behind them.
Welcome to Dunegrass: the ultimate escape for those seeking luxury and privacy.
~ Perfect for weekend trips and honeymoon getaways! ~
There, behind the dune, I looked up at grander fireworks from grander families, filled with a quiet contentment.
Now, I would consider tinkling on the beach –on soft sand, under a star-filled sky, with the sound of waves gently encouraging my bladder –to be one of the more pleasant things in life. Yet, as fate would have it, I was about to discover an unease that is entirely antithetical to the comfort of wearing sweatpants at a cocktail party.
Indeed, this seemingly innocent beach tinkle was about to teach me a hard life lesson…
(To be continued)
Editor’s Note: Katie‘s last post for The Third City was The Hipster Invasion….
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Freya Reese: A Full Day
There are lots of foul-mouthed words you can say to a teacher to get them irate. But in Chicago, the naughtiest of words to offend an “Edumacador” are “Full School Day.”
For a Chicago Public High School Teacher, these words elicit that sucktackular taste of spoiled sardines mixed with peanut butter, caster oil, and four cups of hypocrisy.
According to Mayor Rahm, I do not work a “full day.”
Which is weird, because I thought that working ten plus hours a day made for a “full day.”
I, like every teacher I know, works well beyond the 6.25 hours a day our paycheck clearly outlines we are paid to work….without being asked or told to do so.
I thought this made us diligent and passionate hard workers. But according to the media, you should slap my bootie because all I do is eat Bon Bons and watch Dr. Phil!
Turns out I’m freaking lazy — who knew?
I am all about self-growth. So, I pondered my typical day to see where I have done the public wrong.
As Bart Simpson would say — we’re a bunch of edumacadors….
My Typical Lazy, Shameful Day….
Sleep in and roll out of bed at 5 a.m….
Make sure to pack my lunch and plenty of water bottles – nobody actually eats in the school cafeteria or drinks from the water fountains unless they have a taste for Ebola or dysentery….
Arrive at school one hour before I’m supposed to be there because students wanting extra help come to see me before school starts….
Teach five, 45-minute classes to a total of 160 students….
Have two 45-minute prep periods – make copies, plan curriculum, grade papers, respond to parent emails, make calls to parents, attend scheduled parent/teacher conferences and/or IEP/504 meetings – ya’ know, just being lazy!
Eat lunch, snarfing down a sandwich while frantically finishing what I didn’t have time to finish during my prep periods….
Stay after school for an hour or so to tutor students that show up.
Ah, the good life.
After eight hours at the school, and the last student’s left, I pack up my lazy ass and go home to complete another two-to-three hours of paper work at my kitchen table.
People often ask why I bring work home. “If you’re not done with your work, you should stay at work to complete it,” they might say.
That’s really easy for people to say when they work in a facility that’s fit for that kind of time line.
My school is well over a hundred years old. In the winter, it isn’t properly heated. And in the summer, it’s like an oven cause there is no air conditioning!!!
Mayor Rahm told reporters he sent fans to CPS schools, but I haven’t seen one. Maybe he sent them by Pony Express.
I could open the windows in search of a breeze. But there are no screens on any windows in CPS schools. This poses a dilemma for people like me that are allergic to bees. Not that opening a window makes that much of a difference in air temperature once it is 90 degrees out, but I keep an EpiPen close.
Nothing but the lazy life for Chicago’s teachers — right, Mayor Rahm?
I used to be really bothered by the mice that live in my classroom. But I’ve grown to view them as co-workers — although, my real co-workers don’t crap all over my desk everyday like the mice do. The mice really crossed the line one time when they went into my work bag. It was awkward trying to explain to them that I don’t bring co-workers home with me.
So when there are no more students to see, I am faced with the choice: Should I stay or should I go now?
I go home to finish my work. Home, where there are no mice, no bees, a clean washroom, plenty of drinkable water, and air conditioning.
Teachers have received tons of emails from the board, vaguely outlining the parameters of the “Full school Day.” Each email contradicts the last email.
They don’t have a plan for the extra time tacked on to the end of each day, let alone the 100 degree days tacked on to the end of the year.
The only thing it seems the board agrees upon….is that they don’t want to pay us extra for their demands.
Demanding someone work for free and keeping someone in a facility for the sake of holding them there — wait, doesn’t that define jail?
No, even the Cook County lock up at 26th and California has air conditioning – I checked.
The assault on Chicago school teachers is baffling and demoralizing. But I don’t have time to talk about it right now. It’s Saturday night, I have a stack of papers to grade and I need to get back to being “lazy.”
Editor’s Note: Freya‘s last post for The Third City was Pissing Match.
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Pull My Finger. Written by Milo. Read by Andy Orscheln, Lorenzo Toia, Joel Reitsma, Nels, Laura Korn and introducing Benny Jay as Rolando. Produced by King Conundrum.
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