Dear School Non-Information Professionals

Dear Patrick's New School Secretary,

When I called the other day to find out when back to school night is, you informed me that I hadn't gotten a letter with 'important information' because his old school hadn't sent you all of his paperwork yet. Hmm. Number One, I kind of think that the fact that you're missing paperwork on my boy IS important information all on its own, don't you?? You maybe could have called me about that. Second, he's registered there, he's got a teacher, he's been doing summer homework - I would say he's already a student there; why on earth do you need some piece of paper from his old school to trigger your sending me this VIP info? Is it super-secret, all-forms-filled-out-only information? Do I need a secret decoder ring to read it? Don't worry - I definitely didn't spend last night awake worrying that somehow my boy wasn't registered ANYWHERE anymore. Also, I like how you're secure enough in your job that you could take off the Friday before school starts, and leave someone who knows NOTHING about your job sitting at your desk to greet me when I come in, as directed, to fill in whatever presidential paperwork needs to be done. It's good that in this economy, you're able to say, screw it, all the parents dealing with last-minute Important Paperwork can just take a number. When your startled replacement finally finished stemmering repeatedly that she had no idea what she was doing, and actually LOOKED, she found the list of kids in magnet, and found my boy's file, and from what we could figure out, it looked like you had been missing the HEALTH FORM from his old school, which is now in there (the check mark on the file list was in a different color than the other items). You needed a HEALTH FORM in order to send me the first day of school info?! I hope you were out today so you could take a prioritization class, or maybe seeing some sort of mental health professional yourself.

Thanks for the wasted gas,
Why Do I Bother


Dear School Transportation Department,

One of my goals today was to find out about Josie's bus schedule. I looked online, but the local paper had the information link wrong, and when I finally got to the school site, the school had a list of thirty bus numbers to wade through with no identifying information/searchable content. Yes, I could have clicked on every single link, but if the first one was any indication, each bus has several routes it runs, and it was tremendously confusing. So, I called the phone number you helpfully provided on the website. When you answered, you asked if I had looked online, and I explained my dilemma. You then asked if I had driven over to the school and looked. I replied, 'No; I suppose I could drive over there rather than asking you on the phone right now.' Your answer: 'That would be good, because we're busy.' Wha??? Let me get this straight: you gave me your number so I could call you, and then get told to get in my car and drive across town, rather than simply looking in your computer and answering my question? By the time we went through all that, you could have probably looked it up twice over! What do we pay you for, again? You should talk to the school secretary (see above) - she may have information on a prioritization class for you. But only if you've sent her the correct forms.

Again With the Wasted Gas,
Confounded

Enough

DH has been looking for a new job for awhile now. It's not that his current job is in danger, at the moment, but that they're total asshats. Three times they've promised him bonuses of varying sizes, from the $10k one that turned out to be $500 (which they then bumped up to $1k because his manager threw a fit), and two other ones that never appeared at all. It's not just him, either - everyone is treated the same, and as a result, people are leaving in droves. On his project alone, two people left the other week, one is in final negotiations with a company, and DH and another guy are looking. The only one who is planning on staying is the guy who was only hired about six months ago, because you're kind of stuck for at least a year.

So far, DH has had three serious bites from companies. One fell through, and I was kind of happy about that, because I just wasn't getting good vibes, but two others have been strong. He's had two interviews with one, and three with the other. The second with #1 and the third with #2 were both last week, and both with senior VP-type people. Since then, silence.

On the one hand, it's not bad, because at least it's not a No. But on the other, WTF?! It's been a week. Hauling someone in for interview after interview, I think, increases your responsibility to them, because they've repeatedly taken time off to come over there, aka used vacation time to see you rather than family. I think that deserves at least SOME kind of follow-up, especially when the entire time you've spent with the interviewee has been with everyone saying how impressive the person is and how much everyone has said they like him.

More, though, I think my frustration is broader than just this scenario. No one seems to feel beholden to anyone anymore; there's no common sense of dignity. When I'm out shopping and say have to pass by where someone is looking, I always say 'pardon me' as I pass by, but 90% of the time, the person doesn't acknowledge me at all. Very frequently, someone passing in front of me will stop RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME to look at what I was looking at without saying a word, like I'm not even there! Cashiers wait on the person behind me before I even finish signing the receipt. Even at my church, there are people who do exactly what they feel like doing, regardless of how they make other people feel, or allow their children to be incredibly rude (what is it with people speaking for their children all the time? When I say 'hi, that's a nice dress' to a 6yo child, I want the child to say hello back, not the mom to answer for them or start making conversation with me to cover up for the fact that they haven't taught their kid basic manners!). Companies think it's OK to screw over anyone they want, and outright lie to employees.

I know this is nothing new, really, but most times I can grit my teeth and do my best to ignore all the taking-advantage-of. Maybe it's the heat finally getting to me, like the last straw.

Unicorn Poop

First, let me say, I am DONE with school for THREE WEEKS! Hooray!!! I got all A's this semester, and I'm thrilled and all, but woohoo!!! Time off!

Anyhoo...

We finally had to break down and buy the dogs hypoallergenic food. Delilah is trying to get another ear infection - this would be her fourth - and the vet said if she got another one we should try her on a different food, because recurrent ear infections can be a sign of a food allergy. Great. You all know that there are no normal dog foods that have no grains in them, right? We had to go to the pet store, not the grocery store, and not only that, but we had to go to That Aisle of the store. The aisle where dollar signs drip from the shelves like chow from a torn bag. Crap-a-doodle.

It turns out that all the foods are about the same price once you get to that echelon of pet food - approximately $50 for a 25lb bag. Oh. Mah. GAWD. We go through about 20lbs of chow a week between the two dogs, and there's no way we can feed them different things. Dog food just became its own line item on my imaginary budget.

We settled on Blue Buffalo brand, which I believe is made out of golden geese, the loch ness monster, and little brown pebble things that I think are unicorn poops. At this point, the dogs may be getting better nutrition than we are. It's certainly more magically delicious.

To make it worse, there was a peppy sales person who was actually FROM the Blue Buffalo company stalking the aisle, and I swear she's related to that woman on the Progressive Insurance company, you know, that crazy bump-haired woman in white? She stalked us with wide-eyed sincerity, and even loaded the bag we eventually bought into our cart. It was weird and annoying. I mean, it was bad enough that we're spending our life savings on dog food without a perky woman practically taking it out of our wallets right then and there.

However, I do have to say that after eating their first meal of the Blessed Chow, both dogs are running around the house like they've just eaten rocket fuel. Unicorn turds are tasty, apparently. Also, it's supposed to make them poop less because there are no fillers in it at all. Less dog logs sounds good to me - do you have any idea how much 170 (combined) pounds of dog can serve out? They're like log cabins for moles.

If these new platinum crunchies cure Delilah's ear infections, the money will be worth it, and probably financially come out in the wash, if you figure in what we were spending on vet visits and medicines, not to mention that she still runs and hides when she sees me come into the bedroom at night because I've had to put so many drops in her ears at bedtime. If it doesn't, we'll be meeting you back in the regular dog food aisle, where my debit card doesn't burst into flames upon entry.

Hypocritical

As of today, I finished the work for my fourth class! Hooray!

When I step back, one thing I find interesting about this program is that it doesn't necessarily practice what it preaches. For one thing, we get very little feedback on our work, if any at all. I know that's partly due to the accelerated time frame; the longest we've spent with any one professor is eight sessions (which was still 32 hours). Still, I could count on one hand the number of things I've submitted that have been returned to me, and of those, every one was a minor in-class assessment. In one class, ironically one of the longer ones, we got NOTHING back. Zero. Zilch. The professor, who was great, even took our addresses so he could send us back our journals with comments. They've never arrived, and it's been over a month. I see that I got an A in the class, so I assume that I was on the right track, but I'm a person who really values that input. Work that we do online might as well have been thrown into an abyss, for all I know. I hate that! I know, as a grad student, I shouldn't need a lot of hand holding, but for heaven's sake, not one returned project? Even our 40min presentations went ungraded! Surely there was something that could have used improvement, some area where I was on the money, and a few extra things I could be thinking about for next time? The program stresses 'give feedback to your students, be interactive with your students, don't just talk at them all the time'. The time we spent with my last professor, all we did was sit in our seats and get information crammed down our throats as fast as she could say it, from 5-9:30, with a seven minute break each night to gasp for air (literally, 7 minutes, I don't know what that was about). I just saw that the soon-to-be-replaced program director (who still appears to be teaching one of our courses in the fall, unfortunately - she's the one who was completely unresponsive about all of my admissions paperwork being messed up) will be using straight-out testing based on chapters in a book on instructing math. We have been told countless times in the last two months NOT to evaluate students based solely on standard tests, but apparently that's what we're going to be subjected to - rote learning and regurgitation. Interesting. On the one hand, we're grad students, adults (some much younger than others), and we should be able to force ourselves to learn without as much light and magic as we'll use with our elementary students, but on the other, if brain-based-learning research has shown that people remember concepts much more clearly when they're connected to meaningful discourse and emotional reactions, *and* at the grad level we should be more than capable of higher thinking, shouldn't these professors be modeling what we should be doing ourselves instead of providing a catalog of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do?

Also, I heard a lovely gem from the diversity professor the other night. She told us that on her first job, the principal walked into the staff room on the first day and commented that she loved walking into a room of lovely teachers, and because of that she didn't hire ugly women. The prof said that they all just looked around the room at each other, not knowing what to say. THEN she told us that this person is still a principal in our county! So, on top of everything else, bad job market, tightening budgets, schools closing or being consolidated, NOW I have to be pretty?! I'm sorry, people, but I am not pretty. I can be occasionally cute, and charming, but pretty is not on my list. I've had two kids, I'm pushing 40, and my ass isn't getting any smaller. Nope. Plus, and I know she's right about this, men get hired for teaching positions almost before they apply, because there's such a shortage of male figures in schools. I can't pull that one off, either, due to a serious (thankful) shortage in the penis department. So... I'm going to be teaching myself hypnosis to use in job interviews. It'll be my ace in the less-attractive, decidedly penis-less hole.

My one good piece of news is that the people at the board of ed know who I am, through almost no action of my own. Last year, when I wasn't getting many calls to sub, I talked a few times to Melanie, the woman in charge of the system, and she was really nice. The other day, I called in to RSVP for the annual sub training, and out of the blue she said, 'I didn't know you were getting your MAT - the woman in charge of clearances came down yesterday to check who was on my list as already having one, and I saw your name!' I was really excited. She remembered me! That has to be a good thing, right?

Also in the good department - after this coming week, I get most of the month of August off!

The Not-so-Straight Poop

Yea and verily, there was much rejoicing at my house this morning, for there is no break in my pipe!!!! The city got here at around 7:30 this morning to scope out the sewer (again, amazingly prompt and courteous service, I have never experienced such anything like it) with their cameras, and came all the way into our yard up to our back stoop. All they found was that there's some nastiness caked onto the pipes in at least one spot, and that our main line looks like a bunch of macaroni noodles strung together. There are enough bends and turns in that thing to make a poop slalom, but other than that we're fine. Eventually, we will probably want to have it taken up and replaced with a straighter line, but that's WAAAAAY down the road for us financially. The city suggested that we have a special cleaning treatment that uses basically a water-blaster come through and scour our line, which I had done this afternoon, and he said that when he was finished, he went out to the city sewer line and listened, and he could hear his water line emptying into the city's pipe. He said that although our line will probably need to be replaced eventually because there is one "belly" in it where water collects, we should be fine for a long time. For the moment, we'll be keeping it to using tp that's extremely biodegradable (which I'm not thrilled about as far as my behind is concerned, but if it's going to save me a few grand, I'll suffer) and not flushing ANYTHING, EVER. No "toilet-friendly" butt wipes (which he said were the worst thing ever invented as far as your pipes, BTW), no tampons, no nothing.

There's a little voice in my head that's still worried that this hasn't really done it, that somehow something will still be wrong, in that way that things can still mysteriously be broken even when by all rights they should be perfect, like when you go to the doctor and they pronounce you physically well, and say it's all in your head. I guess I'm concerned that my pipe could still have some kind of neurosis, especially after yesterday's horrible scare. The roto-rooter guy today also told me that unless something's changed, the city is responsible for anything under the road, which directly contradicts what the city guy told my plumber yesterday, so I don't know where all that would have really wound up had we had to go that far, but I don't want to even think about it. I *am* a little annoyed that I have to pay the guy who was here yesterday a pile of money when all he did was scrape and scope over and over again and ended up making no contribution whatsoever to the actual fix, but he was a nice guy, and I'm assuming the main problem is that he'd never seen bendy pipes, so he assumed it was water that was making everything so dark rather than the twisting angles. He wasn't trying to screw me, or else he wouldn't have told me to call the city at all. He did leave a lot of his stuff here, though, in anticipation of needing to come back later on in the week, so I guess I'll be seeing him again soon and we can figure out what I owe him then. Sigh. Still, we spent way less than we would have had we gone ahead and relined the pipes, and certainly thousands less than the worst-case scenario, so I'm still grateful. Funny how you can feel relieved that something was, in the end, "only" about $1k to fix.

So, we have a crooked, but well-cleaned, geriatric poop chute. Owning an old house is a lot like being old yourself - you find yourself openly discussing the grossest things with other people like it was everyday polite conversation. Think of me as Grandma Astarte, sharing my personal woes with you during Thanksgiving dinner - it's gross at the time, but the info might just come in handy someday.

Scared, but Not Crapless

Well, the pipe liner guy (who clears out pipes, and then inserts stuff inside them that hardens into a pipe liner, effectively a new pipe) was here all day, and we are no better off than we were before he got here. In fact, the water is more backed up than it was when I got up this morning. He said that it will trickle down through the main line, that it got filled with water when he ran the pipe cleaner machine because he ran water down while he was cleaning the pipe in hopes it would rinse away the block when he came to it. Since he didn't manage to clear what's blocked, or even find the main blockage, all the water he ran down there has to trickle out into the city pipe past whatever is beyond what he's found.

At one point during the day, he said that we should call the city, because he was starting to think that it wasn't in our pipe at all, but in the city sewer somehow, so I did, and - the only bright point of my day - they were here in TEN MINUTES. It was astonishing, and I'm so grateful that they came right away. They flushed out the city pipe from the manhole area near our house, and said that tomorrow they'll be back to use a camera and see if they can see what's going on on their end, in case it *is* them, and they'll be able to see into our line as well.

Here's the scary part - the guy painted a line from our pipe into the middle of the street, where it connects to the city pipe. He said that if, for some reason, our pipe under the road has to be dug up, we have to pay for it. I don't know how much money that means, but I'm guessing it's a LOT, like $10-15k. I'm terrified. That would only happen if the pipe under there is smashed up so badly that the liner guy can't get the liner through it *at all*. Still, the fact that it's an option scares the bejesus out of me, it really does. We don't have that kind of money, and even to put it on credit would probably strain our finances to the breaking point. I literally don't know what we'd do. I still have ten months of grad school where I will be unable to bring in money, plus even if I'm fortunate enough to get hired to a job right away, my pay won't start coming in until the school year starts, so we're over a year away from me bringing in a paycheck. Technically, I can max out my student loans and get the money from that, but if I don't get a job right away, it'll only delay the problem while building interest.

The liner guy said that the next step for him will be to hear what the city scoping guys say tomorrow, and if they don't find anything on their end, he'll bring in a guy that does cleaning with some kind of jet, like the city uses, that should dislodge anything in its path and completely clear out anything in a way that the spinner thing can't.

The thing is, if the street-dig ends up being our only option, why is it that the city can take ten feet of our property for public works - take our entire HOME if it's in the way, like they did with our last house, and force us out - but if we have a problem in a pipe that's under a city street, WE have to pay for it, even if the pipe isn't on our property, because it connects to our house? Why is it always this way? And why is it that things always seem to go from bad to worse? Please, please, can't we catch a break (and I don't mean one in our pipe), just this one time?

Playing Hookey

How can you tell when a child was homesick?

She comes home with presents for her BROTHER! And then gives him huge HUGS! :) Ah, it warmed the heart. Funny thing was, he wasn't anywhere near as excited to see her, which made me laugh a little since it's usually him that's hugging her and not getting much of a reaction, not the other way around. She was so sweet, though, and brought him a t-shirt and some shark teeth. Also, she only bought presents for him, which I thought was interesting. I didn't want her to buy things for me, obviously, but I thought it was funny that the only person she got stuff for was the one who annoys her the most. :)

She had a great time, and since she was supposed to get home a lot later than she actually did (she was home by 9:30 versus the after-midnight we had been told to expect), I had already told my SIL Kathy that it would only be DH and Patrick at my niece's 20th birthday party yesterday afternoon. I figured, why ruin a good thing?! We still didn't go. I felt a tad bit guilty, but really, it saved me a loooooooong afternoon with people (ie her parents) who make me so nervous that I end up sick to my stomach, and it's not like my niece cared who was there; DH said that all her friends were there so she didn't hang out with the family, anyway. She didn't even open the presents before people needed to get going! Honestly, I keep thinking that at some point, the girl might develop some manners, but it's not looking too likely. Last year, for the first time, we didn't get her anything at all other than a card that we sent down, because there wasn't a family get-together and we have never once gotten any appreciation for anything we've ever bought for her. This year, since there was a party, we had to bring something, but I lucked out because last week Office Max was having a promotion where if you spent $100 in printer supplies, you got a $25 iTunes gift card free, so I did, and that's what she got. We needed new ink in every color, anyway, so I just bought two combo packs so I'll have more on hand rather than going to the store again next time. Done, and done.

So, while DH and Patrick were off at the Event, Josie and I stayed home, snuggled on the couch, and watched To Kill A Mockingbird, and then we made homemade mac and cheese. It was lovely. No nutty relatives, no stress, and no bugs, just me and my girl and our various furry pets. It was lovely. I have missed only *maybe* one other family event in the last thirteen years, and frankly, it may be time to start missing a few more.