This morning I encountered a colleague on my way to fill up my half-gallon mug with ice and water. I fill it up every morning, right after I pour most of the water out from the day before. I really try to drink it all, but I get too busy. Good thing, too, because I'm usually too busy to go to the bathroom as well.
I think Fate put me in this job so she could sit back and laugh. I don't multi-task very well, and my current job requires it. At one point today I was giving students retakes on quizzes, setting three of my advisees up in new courses, texting back and forth with one of my online students, emailing my travel agent because I didn't have my booking number for our cruise yet, creating a lesson for tonight's online lesson [one of the few times I haven't waited until 6:30 to decide what to teach at 7:30], taking a phone call from the guy from whom I won a motorcycle almost 6 months ago and have yet to see either the bike or the cash, texting Hubby to see if what we'd been offered for the bike was enough, writing a letter to the IRS in response to the Nastygram we got from them last Friday, and wondering why I couldn't find time to go down the hall to the restroom.
In my former life as a traditional classroom teacher, I couldn't stand chaos. If I had two ninth grade English classes studying the same play/story/novel, the class period had to end AT THE SAME EXACT PLACE the other class left off, and never mind if we'd had a pep rally, a bomb threat evacuation, a fire drill, a verdict for a major former professional football player that the principal actually encouraged us to turn on during class, or a flood. Those two classes had to start the next day in the SAME EXACT PLACE.
Oh, how Fate must be laughing at me now.
Back to my colleague.
He asked how many days I had left, and without hesitation I responded "399." He chuckled and said something along the lines that it doesn't matter, because "they're going to retire folks like you and me before we want them to."
Too late, buddy. There's no way in hell they can force me to retire before I want to, unless they want to go back in time.
Don't get me wrong, I love my job. For every day like yesterday, when I find myself hating some children, I have three or four when I think I'm making a difference and I find myself loving some other children. And even if they are eighteen years old, they're still children.
But if they would let me take full retirement right now, I would jump at the chance.
As soon as they realize they could replace my doctorate pay (#60 on the county's list, remember) with someone just out of college......
Could someone put a bug in their ears please?
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