i wish i was a little bit taller, i wish i was a baller

Working so many days in the Counselling Department this school year has permitted me to draw the following character sketches of its employees.

Counsellor #1 - M.  M has been counselling in the same school more than ten years.  She says she plans to retire from this school.  When I once repeated that to a colleague he told me rather sharply that someone should tell her that if she wants to retire she should start working first.  I wondered, at first, if staff perception of her lack of productivity was unfair.  After all, who really knows how much someone else is working?  But working with her more closely reveals that she is chronically late for work, and has trouble completing tasks she finds unpleasant.  She does, however, always have pretty nailpolish and nice clothes.  She is also friendly and likeable, apart from the simmering frustration with her lack of ability to finish anything.  When she is overwhelmed, she calls in sick for work, usually three days at a time.

Counsellor #2 - E.  E has been at the school only four years.  Her path to burnout has been sharp and steep.  She does not walk, she speedwalks down the halls of the building, because she is always in a mad panic and always late for something.  If you try to talk to her about kids you have concerns about, she sometimes snaps that she is too busy to see anyone who is not going to die today.  I'm not kidding; that's a direct quote.  E has moments of being a very effective counsellor, but unfortunately these moments are too easy to forget because she sometimes frightens the kids - and staff - by being so snappish.  When she is overwhelmed, she calls in sick for work.  Sometimes for up to two weeks at a time.

Counsellor #3 - N.  N is the newest of the Counsellors, and is the Department Head.  He is from Lebanon, and though he has been in Canada since his teens, he still makes some peculiar mistakes with English.  When he is trying to be nice, he sometimes sounds condescending instead.  I think this is unintentional, but it still rankles people.  N is witty but yet somehow has a way of missing the point quite frequently.  He likes things to be sequential and orderly and gets lost very easily if things do not unfold in a linear manner.  N likes to give the illusion of being supportive, and sometimes speaks in irritating platitudes.  Again, I think this is a language barrier.  I hope it is.  When he is overwhelmed, he goes to Very Important workshops that take him away from the Counselling office for a day or two.  Or three.


These three people support each other's terrible habits.  They take very long lunch breaks, much longer than the rest of the staff, under the pretense of "meeting".  And worse, this year they have developed a new terrible habit of leaving the main door to the Counselling Office closed and locked during the school day.  This, I assume, is to prevent them from having to talk to any students.  Because really, Counselling is a pretty awesome job if there's no one around demanding to talk to you.

These are the people I aspire to work with?  This is the career I've decided is where I really ought to go next.  I wonder if, once safely installed in my tiny little office, I will immediately become a self-important asshole too, too busy to help people, too busy to talk to people, too busy to come to work on time, too busy to unlock the goddamn door for chrissakes.  I wonder if I will notice that I am turning into the opposite of what I meant to be when I said I wanted to help.  Or if I will just be aggravated when people show up at the Counselling office wanting counselling, wondering impatiently how they dare.



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