The teacher collected the permission slips, smiled, and began to chant.
Smoke filled the room, and a swirling portal opened in the middle of the blackboard.
The students rose up from their desks and flew through the door into the Shadow Zone.
Once the last student went through the portal, the smoke cleared.
The teacher sat back in his chair, put his feet on the desk, and enjoyed the silence.
The students would be back when the candle went out.
Candle?
Oh oh. He forgot to light the candle.
He pulled out his cell phone and called the union representative.
Tag: work
Mellow
I know a guy who is so mellow, he set his ringer sound on his alarm clock to the tune of a lullabye.
Instead of waking up, he’s further mellowed out by the lullabye, and he gets even more restful sleep.
The ringtone on his phone is the sound of a gentle breeze through the leaves.
If the call is urgent, then a recording of a gently strumming harp reminds him that there’s nothing truly important enough in this life that merits going out in a rush or a panic.
Of course, we fired his lazy hippie ass this morning.
Ducks In A Row
My boss keeps telling me to get all my ducks in a row.
Have you ever tried to get ducks in a row?
It’s hard. Really hard.
Ducks like to wander around, foraging for things to eat.
They only get in a row if they’re running away from something.
So, I unplugged my keyboard and phone and banged them together to scare the ducks.
Sure enough, they ran down the hall in a row.
Along with everybody else’s ducks.
Pretty soon, the halls filled up with scared ducks running around.
My boss smiled, and then went back to herding cats.
Appointment
I have a doctor’s appointment today.
His staff takes x-rays of my elbow and then sticks me in a room to wait for an hour.
When I’m fed up with the wait, he comes through the door, pokes and prods me for a minute, and then I’m sent to the reception desk to pay and set my next appointment.
I took half a day off to do this. But if I had taken a whole day off, I’d have gotten wellness credit reimbursed on my paycheck for half the day.
My elbow is getting better. It’s my patience that’s broken.
The Brick
As part of my rehabilitation, I have a blue foam Lego brick to squeeze.
This builds up my grip strength.
However, it’s a lot more fun to throw my brick at people.
It’s like a blend of Angry Birds and Tetris.
And Lego, I suppose. Although what’s the point of having just a single Lego brick?
You can’t build anything with it.
I shrug, and look over my toy drawer:
A single Tinkertoy spoke
An erector-set screw
A piece of this
A piece of that
A pile of team-building pieces I never built with.
I squeeze the brick and laugh.
Meetings
For the past week, I’ve been stuck in meetings.
I haven’t gotten any work done at all.
So, my boss wanted to talk to me about it.
In a meeting.
After the meeting, the people I was supposed to meet with around then demanded that I meet with them about missing their meetings.
That resulted in meetings between them and my boss, then more meetings with me about the meetings.
I still wasn’t getting any work done.
In fact, I couldn’t remember what my work was anymore.
I called for a meeting.
Nobody showed up.
So, I took a nap.
Time Away
I prefer not to think of physical therapy as taking time away from being able to meet my deadlines at work.
Instead, I consider appointments at the rehabilitation center to be an opportunity not to worry about deadlines.
The problem with thinking this way is that it’s the pain of the stretching and pulling by the therapist which distracts me from the work deadlines.
In a perfect world, I’d be healthy and have all my time available to get my work done.
I close my eyes, forget about the project due Friday, and let the therapist twist my shoulder again.
Dawn
Her name is Dawn, but she rarely wakes up before noon.
She’s a bartender in the busiest club in Chicago.
When she’s not serving drinks and trying not to fall out of what passes for a blouse, she’s out cold in her bed.
Guys ask for her number, and she’s always giving it to them. Well, she gives them the number she had before it was disconnected.
She never takes a night off, so the bar doesn’t call her in.
One night, she stays up to watch the sunrise. “How beautiful,” she says, and then she goes to sleep.
Crash
Despite the fact that Lieutenant Martin has horrible vision, he is the son of General Martin, so his application to Flight School was approved.
From day one, Junior’s been a bigger threat to our country’s air defenses than any foreign enemy.
He isn’t very good at landings, as you can see from this report on destroyed assets and casualties, but he does show an aptitude for packing and using his parachute, because it has deployed every time.
We’ll resolve this by sabotaging the ejection seat in his next solo flight.
Just hope that he doesn’t crash into your office building.
The Happiest Man
Looking at Walter, with this frown and slouch, you’d think he was an unhappy guy. But if you asked him, he’d say he is the happiest man on earth.
“But we’re on Mars,” I say.
Walter laughs. “I meant to say Mars. Force of habit.”
He goes back to working on whatever he was working on. Usually plans for expanding the biodomes or upgrading the existing footprint of the colony.
“Nobody likes to get displaced and moved for construction and upgrades. They bitch at me. But when it’s over, they thank me. I focus on that.”
And he laughs again.