My Kingdom For A Parking Space

Sometimes it feels as if the forces in the universe are alligning to make this job as difficult as possible, just to see if I have the balls to stick with it. Other times, it feels as if teachers (as people) are the absolute last priority on everyone’s list…that we will just suck it up and deal with ridiculous situations “for the kids.”

If one more person tells me to do it “for the kids”, I might throw a kid at them. Seriously. Stop playing on our good intentions and altruistic dedication to the future and treat us like the professionals you so desperately claim you want us to be. It just seems at times as if this job teeters on the brink of being inhumane.

I thought it was bad enough that I occassionally have to stomp my feet while peeing (to scare the mice away…really). ( I rationalize that it’s good for my thighs.)

Then I thought we had hit rock bottom when the administration took no sort of stance after teachers routinely had their personal property stolen out of their locked classrooms.

When I found a dead mouse in the middle of my rug (with several other LIVE mice feasting on the corpse) at 7:30 a.m., I thought, “This is it…this is as low as we can go. What else can be expected of me?”

And then…they took our parking spaces away.

All of a sudden, after many many many years of being issued parking passes, it has been decided that teachers may no longer park near their school building. They must now a) pay an additional astromonical fee to park in a parking garage in a shady shady neighborhood, b) get to school hella early and pray for a space, c) find another way to get to work or d) just give up

But somehow, I am supposed to still make it to work “for the kids.” I guess with my love “for the kids”, I will be granted the power to make parking spots appear…or maybe if I imagine the kids as I circle the school for 45 minutes each morning I will be less angry? Does that make any sense to you?

WTF? Now you’re going to make a CHALLENGE for me to get to this place in which I have to stomp and pee, obsessively check on my wallet and deal with live demonstrations of Darwinism at work? “For the kids”?

But wait, it gets better. There ARE a very limited number of passes being distributed. Our administrators (some of whom live a ten minute walk from school) snatched those up and left the teachers (some of whom live a 45 minute drive away) with nothing.

So, in sum, because some d-bags with a photocopier made a bunch of fake passes, those of us who actually need and legally use our parking passes will be denied. In the middle of the fall. After we have made decisions about our employment based on our proximity to work and subsequent commute.

I ask you, all-important-decision-making-body, do you want me to just tap a vein? Then you can suck the life out of me directly instead of chipping away slowly at my sanity.