Dear Jackass in Charge,

Believe it or not, I do not wish to spend my Friday evening with you at the work-sponsored Christmas party.  I do not care for you. You seem nice enough, I guess.  If you were my neighbor we’d probably get along just fine.  (Although, you seem like the type who would write a sharply worded letter to the neighborhood association if my garbage can sat on the curb one hour past the garbage can curfew.)  I’m sure you are a lovely person outside of the workplace.  However, your general disrespect for my colleagues and me has ruined any chance we have of getting along.  Let’s just review a sampling of behavior… perhaps you’ll see what I mean.

First of all, you use phrases like “precipice of renaissance” with a straight face.  You gush, “Welcome to Tuesday!” instead of “Good morning.”  or “Hello.”  (Who hired you as the official days of the week spokesperson anyway?)  Regardless, I can’t stand seeing you heading in my direction.  I avoid eye contact to hopefully bypass any of your polysyllabic verbosity (I gots words, too) and idiotic catch phrases.

Then there’s the fact that you don’t like us.  You’ve told us to our faces how spoiled you think we are… and how we have a false sense of entitlement.  Yes, we are truly awful people for expecting other people to… you know… do their jobs.  The nerve!   I can’t tell you how fun it was to sit on the first day of school and applaud the favored members of the staff.  They were called up by name and given gifts for… you know… doing their jobs.  Yet there was no mention of all the staff who came in for two weeks to prepare for the start of the school year… two weeks of their vacation time… two weeks without pay… two weeks for the good of the cause.  In fact, we were scolded for using too much paper and breathing your air or something ridiculous.

I really could go on and on with the terrible things you’ve said and done in our time together, but I think you get the idea.  I don’t care for your management style (if you can call it that).  I don’t want to spend my free time with someone who doesn’t like or appreciate me.  But most of all, I wouldn’t be able to resist bringing my copy of How to Work for an Idiot as my white elephant gift.  Something tells me I’d be in trouble.

In summation, any holiday spirit I have (in the workplace) cannot overshine your general toolishness… and outside of work, you don’t exist.

Sincerely,

Me

While other teachers at those other schools get gift cards… here’s what I get…

Yes, it’s an eraser impaled by a pencil tip with a rubberband strung through it. She placed it on my desk and simply said. “This is for you.” And you know what? I wouldn’t trade it for anything!

Edit: She later told me that it’s a birdhouse Christmas ornament. How cute is that?

Today I was packing the kids up to go home… as we passed our coat hooks, I went through the usual list of left behind items.  “Whose gloves are these?”  “Somebody left their hat.”  “Whose boots are those?”  “Lucas, you forgot your sweater.”  “Somebody left their pizza sauce.”  With a hundred little puzzled stares aimed at me, I leaned over to look a little closer to make sure I hadn’t lost my mind… nope… completely sane.  “Somebody left their pizza sauce.”  A hundred little giggles… (and nobody claimed it).

Our classes are always being asked to create displays for special events in the school.  They are usually a part of some competition.  Not to sound conceited, but my class generally wins.  Well… we win when we TRY to win.

Yes, that’s right… I don’t always try to win.  Why?  I have a competitive spirit, but also some common sense.  If the prize for winning a contest is a field trip to an undisclosed location planned by the most disorganized person in the school… then I’m pretty much going to do the minimum to avoid winning.  If there is a pizza party or something fun involved (and impossible for someone to screw up)… then we’re going all out!

There are other highly competitive teachers, too… but they always do their best.  They’re always nervous, too.  I purposely wait and make mine the last one up just to generate a little fear.  Like this week, for example…  we were asked to create a display about our assigned country for Hispanic Heritage Month.  I waited until the last minute to do mine (traditional Snarky style).  In the meantime, one teacher in particular was very nervous about this.  I took advantage of the situation and had a co-worker plant some information at lunch time.  “I can’t figure out what Snarky is up to… she’s been very secretive about her project!”  Mission accomplished… everyone was all worked up by the afternoon.

Then my plan backfired.  I started to feel like the display should have a little something extra just to warrant all the hype.  Not enough to win, but enough to keep my reputation in tact.  So I decided to add a LITTLE flair to our display.  Apparently it was too much flair… everyone was buzzing about how cute it turned out.  (Obviously, I have no idea how powerful my flair truly is.  LOL)  Now I’m the one who is super nervous… we just might win this thing.  And even worse… the prize hasn’t been announced… the great unknown!  Serves me right for stirring up trouble.

The war between Snarky and her Mac has escalated to physical violence… on the part of the Mac.  OK… so maybe I started the fight last year when I would bang the laptop on the desk to get it to power up.  But this is an entirely new laptop… it doesn’t know about my past war crimes.

Anyway… from the very beginning, the Mac has been trying to hurt me.  The edges on this thing are unbelievably sharp, cutting into my wrists all day long.  My friends laughed at me and called me a wimp… they couldn’t possibly imagine that a company would make a computer with razor sharp edges.  Hmmmm… just mine, I suppose.  But I googled it and discovered that many were experiencing the same issue.  In fact, there are even cushion-type products on the market for just this issue.  There wasn’t much I could do, so I covered the edges with sticky notes (classy!) and learned how to type with my wrists in the air a little more.

Today, however, the Mac lashed out at me and actually drew blood!  I was shutting it down and shoving it in my file cabinet for the night, when it actually sliced my finger open.  That bitch!  This wasn’t even caused by the sharp edges… it was something lethal on the outside of the laptop.  Who manufactures these things?  Ginsu?

So I just want you all to know… if my lifeless body is found at work near my desk… it wasn’t suicide… it was the Mac.

A small group of my struggling students were reading a book about a birthday party with me today.  The last page had this picture on it:

We talked about what was going on in the picture, and I asked the students what the girl got as one of her presents.  One student said, “It looks like a teddy bear.”  But then another student interrupted, in all seriousness,  and said, “No!  It’s chicken!”  “CHICKEN?”  We all leaned in to look closely at the picture in our books… trying to figure out why she sees a chicken instead of a teddy bear.  Then it dawned on me… the brown lumpy fur kind of looks like KFC Original Recipe!

Still giggling…

I feel absolutely awful!  My last frog died today.  After wishing her demise yesterday, I feel REALLY guilty now.

I love animals… I have more compassion for them than I do for people many times.  I feel very cold-hearted for being happy to see these pets go.  In my defense, I even get upset when a harmless pixel animal gets killed in WoW… I have actually uttered the phrase, “Oh no, I killed a frog!”  Oh, the irony!

I’m sure there’s some sort of karmic retribution waiting for me, as a result of my evil thoughts…

I took a nature walk with my students yesterday to collect leaves and seeds for science.  We did all kinds of sorting and investigating with our finds.  During recess today some students were looking at our leaves and stuff again.  I overheard one student say (in reference to some berries), “Don’t touch those!  They poison!”  Another student responded (in a very “duh, you’re an idiot” tone), “Ms. Kitten wouldn’t pick them if they poison!”  I had to laugh… it was too cute!

It was also an interesting situation, though.  One student was so rooted in common sense and the other relied completely on trust.  Which one would win out?  Well, the kids all looked at each other… shrugged… and touched the berries.  LOL

Trust is everything… any relationship without it is poison.

We recently had Open House night at my school… you know, where the kids bring their parents in and drag them around the school to meet their teachers.

As a project for Open House, I recorded my students acting out scenes of a story we had been working on.  Then I used iMovie to put it all together into one little movie.  It was really a hassle, but turned out quite cute.  Anyway… my plans were to show the movie that night right from my laptop with a projector.  Ha… the mac had other ideas, of course.

I checked out the projector from the library, and when I tried to set up the system, I discovered that the cable did not plug into the new laptop.  Grrrrrr.  Of course nobody was around after school to help…
so I came in an hour early for Open House that night and managed to track down our helpful media specialist.  She found the updated adapter for me.  (Apple is really good about making you buy 100 new accessories when you upgrade your computer.)  I set everything up with the new adapter… turned everything on… nothing.  NOTHING!

The media  specialist came down to help me, but couldn’t get the thing to work either.  We WANTED to call the technology dude for help, but he’s one of those people who make you feel like an idiot when something doesn’t work… and then proceeds to tell everyone else what an idiot you are… for years.  And more times than not, he can’t fix it either and then proceeds to blame the problem on something YOU did… not his lack of skill.  Neither one of us really wanted to deal with him, so we continued to tinker on our own.  No luck.  We finally decided to move my movie to an old laptop and try hooking that up.  It worked!  Whew.

The movie was a big hit at Open House.  I even had parents recording it on their cell phones so they could share it with other family members.  One father saw the mess of computers and cords on my desk and said, “Oh, is this your new computer?”  I explained that it was actually an old one and pointed out the new one… then detailed all the trouble we had.  He responded, “Well, I can tell you what your first problem is.”  “Oh?” I asked hopefully.  He laughed, “Yeah, that apple icon on top there.”  Exactly.