This Is What You Do

This is what you do if you are a student on the next to next-to-last day of school, and want to pretend that the inmates rather than the caretakers are running this asylum:

1. Sit in a random seat that is not your allotted parcel of real estate on the official seating chart.

2. Leave your own cell phone laying on a desk, on, with a picture of yourself displayed, when you exit the classroom at the dismissal bell.

3. Ask to go to the bathroom during the last two minutes of the school day, then stand behind your friend, flagrantly flaunting her cell phone in plain sight within the confines of the classroom during the thirty-second chair-straightening portion of the last class of the day.

This is what you do if you are a teacher on the next to next-to-last day of school, and want to pretend that you give an obese rodent's behind what the young scoffrules are up to:

1. Ask a student in the back row what seat he would like to sit in that would move him closer to the front of the room and the projector screen that will imminently display an action-packed film of the class's choosing, and then move the unauthorized squatter to the back row vacant seat.

2. Tell the next-hour student who brings you the found phone, "Oh! You must take that to the office and turn it in! Somebody will surely be looking for that." Heh, heh. The look of chagrin on the face of the loser-weeper, upon returning to the scene of the rule-scoff, asking if anybody found anything on a desk, and being directed to the office to inquire about the misplaced contraband, is priceless.

3. Give permission while muttering that the only reason anyone asks to go to the bathroom during the last two minutes of the school day is to text a boyfriend, friend, parent, or total random stranger who just texted one during class time. Upon return, with the final seconds ticking, call out the bathroomer for hiding with a cell phone in sight by asking, "Did you not have enough time in the bathroom to finish your texting?" The resultant blathering about it not even being Bathroomer's phone, but the blocking friend's phone, will tie up Bathroomer for a good bit of her own time after the final bell. Thus negating the seconds saved for the grand getaway by all that text planning before the bell.