The person who cleans my room is the cleaningest cleaner who ever cleaned! The place gleams like a tile-and-steel operating theater. No germ would dare to encroach upon my sterile territory. However...
I don't mean to be a complainer. But this leopard cannot change her spots. Spots which would be scrubbed from her very hide, if she was under the jurisdiction of The Cleaner, making her a rare, stand-out, albino sitting duck for predators.
By now, folks should be privy to Mrs. Hillbilly Mom's peccadilloes. She is the captain of her ship. On that ship, there is a place for everything. And everything had better be stowed away in its place. This was no problem for The Original Cleaner. In fact, it seemed to apply to objects on the floor as well as classroom furniture and major appliances. Without even time to break in a middle-of-the-road replacement, The Cleaner was assigned to Mrs. Hillbilly Mom's flotilla.
What could possibly go wrong with a gold-medal caliber cleaner, you ask? Bounds-overstepping. That's what.
Imagine my surprise, one minute before first bell, when I noticed that my four rows of desks, with accompanying chairs, were out of alignment by two tiles. That's two feet! Twenty-four inches! It might as well have been a thousand miles! Because, you see, I know my students. I deliberately place my desks in a predetermined grid for maximum classroom efficiency. Too far forward, and they pin me against the board by afternoon. Too far aft, and they block the main aisle across the back of the classroom. Too much space in between, and the sardining effect is negated. Students feel free to roam willy-nilly about the classroom.
It was too late to remedy the situation for first hour. I should have noticed upon arrival, but was caught up in some last-minute changes to my lesson plan, which required typing and printing and copying a word bank of twenty words. So I muddled through.
As soon as my plan time rolled around, I moved twenty-five desks and twenty-five chairs back into the proper position. To add insult to my perceived injury, I have the kids line them up each day before the final bell. So all that half-butted work and my accompanying haranguing had been an exercise in futility.
We won't take time today to discuss the relocation of my plastic, four-drawer tower of textbook CDs that had been moved where I couldn't reach them without standing.
Please. This is like hiring a Merry Maid and discovering that she moved your furniture to suit her personal feng shui needs.
4 comments:
If this is the daytime cleaner, you can get revenge.
Feed your students a huge amount of food in a short period of time--pizza, soda, brownies. Several pieces of pizza, 3 or 4 sodas, and half a pan of brownies per student should do the trick.
Then, since teenagers are notorious for having hollow legs, do something to bring the magma up. Have the kids do jumping jacks after they eat until...Kaboom! They hurl like Mt. Vesuvius.
Mr. Overstepping Cleaner will have puddles of puke to clean up all over floor.
Sioux,
Indeed, this is a daytime/nighttime cleaner. Our times overlap by a couple of hours.
I cannot bring myself to apply your brand of revenge. I have visions of the ladies' auxiliary barfing all over the Benevolent Order of Antelopes.
And I smell that sawdust stuff from my childhood school days. Do they even use that anymore?
What was that stuff they put on the floors? In my elementary school it was pink and looked like shredded erasers and smelled like pepto bismol.
Kathy,
I don't know, but it WAS pink, and came in a canister, and was shaken out like Parmesan cheese onto the offending upchuck. I gag now to think about it.
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