I Knew it was Too Good to Be True.....

When something seems too good to be true......

.....it means somebody probably made a mistake.

A few weeks ago you may remember I served as an online substitute teacher. A substitute online teacher. An online teacher substitute. Whatever.

The rate of pay for substitutes in the online world is $30 per day. I'm thinking there may be face-to-face schools out there who don't pay that much. I subbed for two weeks, and at the end of that period I felt guilty, because I didn't feel I had done $300 worth of extra work.

I was still glad to take their money.

Imagine my surprise when I got my monthly (electronic) invoice. It listed the sub pay as $300 all right.....FOR EACH SECTION I subbed for. [There was no way not to end that sentence with a preposition. I'm just sayin'.....] The teacher for whom I was subbing had 3 sections of Journalism, so you do the math..... I got $900 for serving as a substitute teacher for two weeks, which is more than I got for a MONTH of teaching my regular online students. I felt even more guilty.

I was still glad to take their money. All the way to the casino in Mississippi.

Today I got an email from the money person at my online employer, telling me I had been overpaid by $600 and that the money would be deducted from this month's invoice.

Rats.

I can't complain, though. I remember telling my co-workers that their substitute pay policy needed to be fixed. I just didn't want them to start with me.

I wish I had rejected the link on THAT email.

Pick Me, Pick Me.......

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?