The stupidity never ends

Right, so I walked into work yesterday and checked the schedule. What did I see? Apparently one of my day’s holiday hadn’t been put on it correctly and even though my classes had been taken off of my schedule, a class of Fun Colleague’s had been PUT ON it due to the fact that SHE’LL BE ON HOLIDAY THAT DAY!

Conversation:
MrT to Bossman: ‘You know that class of FC’s that you want me to teach?’
BM: ‘Yes?’
MrT: ‘Tell me what seat numbers they’ll be in on my airplane and it’ll be no problem.’
BM: ‘You’re on hols that day?’
MrT: ‘Yes, you approved it in July.’
BM: ‘Oh shit.’

The daftness baffles me.

I’ll be back after Christmas Break. Happy Christmas and New Years to all.

Scheduling update

with reference to this post.

I hadn’t planned on telling them until tomorrow, but I was cornered by Bossman and Young Secretary about a new class that they wanted me to teach one of the weeks I’ll be on hols in January and had to tell them. It came out like this:

MrT: ‘You do realise that I’ll be on holiday that week, don’t you?’
Bossman: ‘WHAT?’
Young Secretary: ‘NO!’

I pulled out the paperwork and showed them that it had been approved in July.

MrT: ‘Feel free to send my students to [place I’ll be visiting].’

Even though it happened a couple days earlier than I had hoped it would, it was a scream seeing the looks on their faces and watching them frantically scramble to the schedule and start looking for substitutes.

All I wanted to do was print

I had a PDF file that I needed to print out before 13h30 for a student. That should have been an easy feat, but nothing's ever that easy at my school.

The Stone Age computer that the teachers are allowed to use gave an error message every time I tried to open the file. The computer lab was being used by a class, so I couldn’t go there. I asked Young Secretary if I could use her computer to print and she said, ‘I’m working,’ which she was but not with the computer. She could have stepped away for a minute and taken her paperwork with her.

I went into Bossman’s office and explained my predicament to him, and he told me that I could print from his laptop. We put my memory stick in and his ancient laptop didn’t recognize it. What to do? Time was ticking.

Finally, Secretary from Hell got up and went for a cup of coffee. Before YS could object, I sat down, put my memory stick in, brought up and printed the file, retrieved my memory stick and then left. It took about 45 seconds.

Things shouldn’t always have to be this difficult.

Why do I stay here?

Conversation with Tall Colleague:

MrT: 'You know, TC, there are days when I really hate working here. Today is one of them.'
TC: [chuckles] 'What's going on here nowadays? Everyone seems to hate working here,' [in an 'I do too' tone of voice.]

In all fairness, I usually like my job but the past few weeks have been sheer hell in many different ways, and I have recently been put in a quite awkward situation. I'll soon be taking over a class from another teacher (under protest), who also happens to be a mate of mine, because the bosses have totally fucked him over and are making him take the fall for it after two colleagues stabbed him in the back.

Roll on, Christmas break!

Shooting himself in the foot

I do a bit of extra work for Bossman that the rest of our teachers don’t know about. It’s totally legal (I pay taxes on it), but has been a well kept secret for quite a while now. Or at least it used to be.

I give Bossman a separate invoice every month for it, which he prints out and submits to Old Secretary, our payroll clerk, by leaving it on her desk. It just so happened that Smileroid went into the office, saw an invoice on OS' desk with my name on it and read it. The invoice he read had my name in large type and the rest of it was in small print. So, couldn’t have just glanced at it for a second and read it, he had to have made a conscious effort to read it. When he came back into the teachers’ room, he told me that I shouldn’t leave my invoices lying around, so I went to the office, got the invoice and handed it to OS. She then played innocent and said, ‘I don’t know where that came from. It must be for BM,’ and picked it up and started walking to his office. I said to her, ‘It’s FROM BM and it’s for you to pay! I don’t want other teachers knowing my personal business!’ and walked off after she put it in her stack of invoices to pay.

When I returned to the teachers’ room, SR started questioning me about it. I thanked him for informing me of the situation and ignored his questions. He pursued, so I gave him a stern look and said in a firm (but quiet) tone, ‘Forget you’ve ever seen that invoice!’ and the questions stopped.

BM’s has most likely just shot himself in the foot by his carelessness. SR is notorious for not being able to keep a secret, so he’ll probably either ask BM for extra work of the kind that I’m doing (which BM and I have agreed is exclusive to me), or tell the others about the invoice.

I’ll let BM take the heat for this and will enjoy watching him squirm his way out of it.