My Compliments From The Staff

Yesterday between classes I noticed a gathering of custodial staff near my classroom door. One shift was coming on, one shift was going off, and one was apparently visiting from another building.

The one scheduled to clean my room that day turned to me and said, “I was telling them, I bet your house is spotless.”

“No. It’s actually the opposite. I have a lot of clutter. I’m not a hoarder or anything! But it’s not spotless.”

“Oh, but your room is always the cleanest. We hardly have to do anything.”

“Well, I have my kids straighten up a little at the end of the day. And I try to keep them busy. But they DO have their moments. Some days there’s a scattering of broken pencil pieces from a battle. And some days there’s mud from the tech school kids’ boots.”

“Your room is so easy. Yours and Mrs. Not-A-Cook. But she only has a few kids all day long.”

“Well, I have 100 every day, but mostly we keep things under control.”

“I can tell you whose is the worst!” Before I could stop her, she blurted it out. “Mr. DairyBar. He has all those boys!”

I did not mention that I had most of the same boys. Not that it matters. Even OldCus used to tell me that my room was the best. In fact, OldCus furthermore said that you can tell what a teacher is like by the way they keep their room.

Maybe that was just OldCus’s way of telling me that it looked like I never do anything in my classes.

Let the record show that last Cus never had anything good to say about my apparently immaculate room. Last Cus would have found an albino's eyelash on the white speckled industrial tile, and roped it off with crime scene tape, and then brought in the giant buffer to polish out the flaw after bleaching the area checking my microwave for cross-contamination.

Yeah. All that theme-playing from The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly in the foreshadowing of an ultimate showdown was not just your imagination. However, Mrs. Hillbilly Mom has now been validated.

It wasn't me, it was Cus.