Friday, June 3, 2011

Coworkers, making out and weird bugs

I had returned to work in San Antonio after being on a short vacation, and the first thing I had to do was present a local student with an award. As someone else - her teacher, or someone - was talking about why she deserved the word, I stood next to the podium and read the award. There were several misspellings and other errors on the ward and I was shocked at how this could have been approved in my absence - clearly I was needed to look over things exactly like this. The person finished speaking and the girl - Lauren A. Glass was her name, even though the award listed her as Lauren AGlass - came up to receive her award. I handed it to her and helped her mitigate the few local reporters who wanted to ask her some questions. Then, I went to the back of the room to say hi to a coworker; I explained how bad the award looked because of all the errors and he just smiled and shook his head. A long table appeared in back and we went to sit at it to eat lunch with a bunch of our other coworkers. DL from high school apparently was a coworker, and she and I sat next to each other. I got a text message from KBK (also from high school and haven't heard from since then in real life) telling me that he worked at one of our rival schools in M'town and he heard from an intern that I was hooking up with another teacher there, he wanted to know if it was true. I was astonished - no one had known that said teacher and I had kissed - and simply replied "What?" This text message marked the second person to ask me about this situation, though, so I immediately texted the teacher and said "Have you been talking about us? Have you been telling people that we've kissed? If so, you need stop right now - people here are asking me about it!"

Suddenly, I was in the San Antonio office, at a desk on the opposite side from where I'd worked in real life. I was going through some emails before heading to the other side to say hi to a few other people, especially KK since she hadn't been at our lunch. An Outlook invite came across my screen for a weekly meeting, Noon-6 a.m., to see who could come up with the best appetizer dish. Everyone from my team was on the meeting - including the one person that was instrumental in my no longer working there in real life - and had already proffered what they would make. The invite came from a new admin assistant that had started while I'd been away, so I was going to send her an email asking about the time of the meeting as well as correcting some other spelling error, but then decided that it would be better to go introduce myself to her face-to-face first. I saw that there was a mark on my laptop's mouse pad so I scratched it to try to get it off, but it turned out to be a bug and it got up and flew to the floor. I watched the praying mantis, horrified, as it crawled across the floor, turned to look at its scratched butt and continued walking toward the sliding door on the opposite side of the room. For some reason, I'd thought that when it looked at its butt, it would know that I was the one who'd done it and would come after me, so I was glad when it didn't. I went across the hall to the other office then, and before I could say hi to KK and introduce myself to the new admin assistant, I walked over to my boss's office and he said, "What are you doing here? You need to clean out your desks - both of them. You still don't have a job here." I was shocked at his abrasive tone and surprised - still - that he wouldn't give me a chance to explain or defend myself.

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