Monday, October 31, 2016

When your day starts off precariously balanced on a chair in the front of the room...

Is your day sucking a little bit? Sam, I'm thinking about you. :0 Let's commiserate! Here is how my day started:

4:30 am - Wake up. Someone (*delicately clears throat*) set the alarm in our guest room without Mike or I noticing. Mike goes down to turn it off, but it woke both of us. We unhappily fall back to sleep.

5:30 am - Anne wakes us up when her and Oreo the penguin make a pilgrimage to the potty.

6:30 am - I blearily wake up and stumble out of bed. Long before anyone should be expected to employ coherent thought, I am pressed into service assembling Halloween costumes, pinning various things, and shoving not-nearly-stretchy-enough headpieces onto (apparently) heads that are far too large for aforementioned headpieces. This has always been a problem with my kids. Apparently, Mike and I make very tall, large headed children.

7:30 am - Mike takes the kids to school, and I unhappily head to work with my gigantic travel mug full of coffee.

8:15 am - Given the last minute nature of what we decided to do for our lesson this week, I am scrambling to finish up a few things before my class at 9.

8:50 am - I head to class, planner, notes, and coffee mug in hand.

8:55 am - I arrive at class. I greet students. I realize that I forgot my flash drive which contains an important MLA citation example exercise we will spend half the class time going over.

8:56 am - *$%#@^&$@!

8:56 am and 30 seconds - I race back to the library to fetch my flash drive, accumulating lots of extra steps on my Fitbit, but many, many unhappy thoughts aswirl in Tiffany's head.

9:01 am - I arrive back at the classroom, extremely proud of self, flash drive in hand. I re-greet students, pop flash drive in, and attempt to fire up the monitor on the instructor workstation. Aforementioned monitor fails to respond.

9:02 am - &^%$#@%*(!

9:03 am - I troubleshoot with the monitor, which translates to handling it roughly, shoving plugs in and out of holes, and moving the screen around in random directions. To the surprise of absolutely no one, nothing happens.

9:04 am - I resign myself to a non-working monitor and test out the projector. It works fine, despite the monitor not responding. I resolve to work bravely along with a crink in my neck as I lean painfully back and to the left to navigate with my mouse. Whatevs.

9:05 am - I turn to the projector screen to pull it down. The cord is wrapped around the rolled up screen several times, meaning that I cannot pull it down from ground level like usual.

9:05 am and 30 seconds - *&^%$$^&*&@!

9:06 am - With nothing but glazed over expressions greeting my every movement, I quickly dismiss the idea of asking a tall person to assist me, roll over the instructor chair, and carefully balance on it to unwrap the cord. VERY UNSTEADILY. Not the smartest idea I'd ever had, but hey, I was desperate. Somehow, it works.

9:07 am - We finally start class, me frantically opening browser windows and typing in URLs while wrenched to the side so that I can see the projector screen.

9:46 am - I finish class successfully, much relief in my heart. As the students file out, I call classroom services to let them know about the monitor:

"Hi! I'm in room 114, and the monitor isn't responding in here."

*delicate pause*

"Oh yes, we get calls about this all the time. Is the monitor powered on? The button is very tiny and hard to see, so people often don't realize that it is off. It's in the back, lower right side."

*Tiffany examines alleged button*

"Oh. There is indeed something there, let me press...Ah ha. Yes, that was it. It's fine now."

*Tiffany breathes sigh of relief that she did not identify herself at the outset of the call*

"A lot of people don't see it, no worries."

I had never seen the instructor workstation monitors powered down in the classrooms, they're always just sleeping and spring to life when you log in, so the thought didn't even occur to me. And the "button" is practically non-existent. So I'm trying to defend myself here, but I think I can sum it up by saying: I AM AN IDIOT IN NEED OF MORE COFFEE. PERHAPS WITH A SHOT OF BAILEY'S IRISH CREAM.

*collapses*

I now have to look forward to: Another class. Cooking for the kids and re-stuffing into Halloween costumes solo since Mike has to teach. Solo trick-or-treating, which will almost certainly include a "coffee mug" as was alluded to above. All before any of the other things I wanted to get done today. Bet you can't wait for tomorrow's post.

:0

5 comments:

  1. I love your sense of humor over horrible stuff that goes wrong. I think if a person doesn't have humor with life then a person is likely to lose it at some point.

    I mean look at my day. My oldest has a melt down because it's Halloween so he's edgy. After being kicked and punched repeatedly, we start having a conversation about "10 ways you can destroy your homework" as a possible comic book title. He then decides he'd rather write about "10 ways to destroy the Earth." Whatever way to get your frustration out. Somehow my life has turned into Pinky and the Brain from animaniacs.

    God has a sense of humor.

    ReplyDelete
  2. On second thought. Not Animanicas. Marvin the Martian right? He's the one trying to destroy the Earth. Pinky and the Brain are trying to take over the Earth. Maybe I need caffeine.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh gosh! That was quite a morning you had! :0
    I had a boy *dive* into a block tower that another child had built. While my professor was there observing me. *sighs heavily*
    It was a very long and interesting day at practicum.
    But! Tutoring went a lot better than I thought it would. Feeling more confident in that area. So that was a good way to end my day. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Delta,

    I just snorted over the comic book title issue. :0 Indeed, we need to stay smiling in order to stay sane!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sam,

    Oh my. Those things ALWAYS happen when you least want them to! Not that you ever want anybody diving into anything :0 but you know what I mean. Want to stay positive on the tutoring!

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for commenting! I read and appreciate every single one, and I will respond to each one personally!