Thursday, the faculty of Newmentia celebrated Teacher Appreciation Week with a brought-in meal from Pasta House. It was delicious, considering the alternative was a cafeteria tray, or four-day-old Chinese, or stinky fish. We had a flat noodle with broccoli and chicken in it, and a shell noodle with red sauce and maybe some cheese in it, and a tube noodle with white sauce and maybe mushrooms in it. As you can see, Mrs. Hillbilly Mom does not know her pasta. We also had salad, rolls, and cheesecake.
Friday, there were some leftovers, but who wants to spend over half the lunch 20 minutes digging out cold pasta and waiting in line to heat it in the microwave? Not Mrs. HM, that's who. Only one of us ventured in to partake of the noodle. However...after lunch was over, when Mrs. HM had plan time and multiple copy jobs to procrastinate, she joined two others at the trough for leftover cheesecake. Let the record show that we were out of plates, but a perfectly good small Styrofoam bowl would suffice. The lack of forkage was problematic.
"Hey, where did you get that fork?" Mrs. HM asked her cousin Tomato-Squirter.
"Oh, there are forks in the cabinet." Let the record show that for an English teacher, T-S does not use many adverbs, nor adjectives.
"Which one?" asked the forkless Mrs. HM, opening her third door of the 20 or more upper cabinets that lined two walls of the teacher workroom, not yet having started on the same amount of lower cabinets. "Oh. This must be it."
There was a Styrofoam cup in that upper cabinet, just the regular small coffee size, with about five clear plastic handles poking out the top. Maybe forks. Maybe spoons. Or in a cruel twist from Even Steven, maybe knives. Mrs. HM was hampered momentarily by Sweet Alabama Beige, who was under her left armpit, scooping out more of the leftover flat noodle, which she had not had time to feast upon at lunch. Sweet Alabama Beige withdrew, and Mrs. HM closed her thumb and forefinger around the base of that cup to bring it down and check on the plasticware.
"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
The load in that cup shifted, and plastic forks rained down upon the populace. Which at that moment consisted of Mrs. HM, Sweet Alabama Beige having just made an opportune exit, and Tomato-Squirter to Mrs. HM's right, jamming that clear plastic lid back down over the black plastic plate of assorted cheesecake slices. Seriously. She knew Mrs. HM was going to snag one of those. Did she think cheesecake would go bad in the sixty seconds it would take to get a fork?
"What's going on in here? I heard a scream!" It was our trusty support staff from the other side of the wall, the one who controls the heat in the teacher workroom from the thermostat in her office. Let the record show that she is a coldblooded creature who might be found laying upon the blacktop road, warming herself, during a spate of 100-degree days.
"Oh, that was just Mrs. Hillbilly Mom. She's busy dumping out all the extra forks, mainly onto her own head."
"Wait a minute! I was not the one who screamed! Let out an 'oops' maybe. But not a scream. That was you! I don't know what you were so excited about. Nothing hit you. Sweet Alabama Beige was the lucky one. Because she was standing right here only seconds before the pointy-utensil downpour."
"I did not scream! It was you!"
"No. It was YOU."
"Well, I heard it on the other side of the wall. So I came to see if everyone was okay."
"That proves it right there. If it sounded like ME, nobody would ever have come to check. That's a fact, Jack. Nobody ever comes to check on me. So it MUST have been you."
Let the record show that either of them put up an argument.
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