There When Not Needed, Not There When Needed.

Yesterday, I achieved a milestone at work. I figured out how to put an ink cartridge in my classroom printer. It was actually kind of easy. All I had to do was fiddle around yanking on all sections of the printer's body. I found out that one little thumb-depression thingy pulled a side of the front open. And on the other side was a matching thumb-depression thingy! VOILA! A yank to both at the same time ripped open the front of my printer. AND THERE WAS A HANDLE! A handle on the old ink cartridge.

I hoofed it up to the office, but no one was minding the store. Another seeker of different swag told me to look for the secretary in the AD's office. Uh huh. She's a traveling secretary, but not like George Costanza, assistant to the traveling secretary to the Yankees.

She finished her side job, and came back to the office and left again. She needed to use a shepherd's crook to hook a coach from their cafeteria meeting so he could reach high up on a shelf for my ink cartridge. That little bit of business worked out, I trotted back to my room to rip that sucker open and insert it into the slots. Yep. I carefully observed while pulling out the old cartridge, then jammed in the new one. A quick test print of the word TEST (what else?), and I was in business. The business of printing seating charts and rosters that would be obsolete by second hour on the first day.

We do not recycle those cartridges. I called to ask. So I stuffed it back in the box it rode in on, and wrote in Sharpie across the front: USED CARTRIDGE, TRASH. That's because sometimes some people don't know what trash is. I put it with a corner inside my wastebasket. Because sometimes some people think you just rest a perfectly good box across the top of that wastebasket, and don't want it accidentally thrown away.

When I rushed in this morning, ready to start the very first day of my next-to-last school year, that cartridge box was still on top of my wastebasket. Covering yesterday's trash.

Don't make me start Cus-ing again.