Light standards

This morning Heg called me on my classroom phone, interrupting the flow of pearls of wisdom I was distributing.  "Hello," I said, only mildly irritated.

"Lisa, I need you to be a medium," he said immediately, rapidly.

"Umm..." was all I could think of while my mind conjured up ridiculous images of spiritual mediums dressed in gypsy bangles.  And that blond woman from Long Island.

"Well can you?"  He seemed a little impatient for a man who was asking me to take a rather large step outside my comfort zone at 8:30 in the morning.

"Ummm..." I said with even less conviction than the first time.  I like to try new things, really, but I felt a bit put on the spot.

He said, "Okay, great, thanks, bye," all staccato like that,  and hung up.

When I cornered him in the staffroom later to ask him what in the hell he was talking about he told me that he had run out of Small staff t-shirts and so he needed me to take a Medium instead.



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Literally ten minutes after that phone call, I received a second call from the Counselling office.  "Hi," I said, feeling weary.  It was NJ.

He said, "Hello, Live Wire!"

It was too early to ask questions.  I just said, "Hello N, what's up?"  I expected him to ask me to send a student up to talk to him.

Instead he said, "I'm just calling to tell you that I'm going to call you Live Wire from now on.  Is that okay with you?"  I could hear in his voice how delighted he was with this pronouncement.

"Yeah, sure," I said, while thirty curious twelfth graders stared at me.

"Okay good.  Bye Live Wire!" he said and hung up.

I don't really know NJ very well.  Certainly not well enough for him to know whether or not I'm a live wire.  And not, I thought, well enough for him to bestow upon me a nickname.  It appears I was mistaken.

When I shared this story later with RDub (I'm allowed to give nicknames) he found it more hilarious than bewildering (as I did) and insisted on my listening to Mötley Crüe's version of Live Wire with him.

I feel like my workplace is becoming a bit of a circus.



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Still nothing on Cuckoo Soo.


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