Kate's Challenge

So the challenge was to post something in a strange environment in fifteen minutes…

The pressure is on and already I’ve had to go back and correct half a dozen typos! But here goes in earnest.

I’m at the boy’s boarding school, in a little shoebox room that is my teaching space for the day. I chose which day I wanted to teach here by finding out who (out of the instrumental teachers I know and like) would be coming in on which day. Thursdays present the best social opportunity for me, since I’ve got another mentor guitar teacher here and my good mate the brass teacher, who is also a smoker. He and I carpool out of the grounds for quick cigarette in the breaks.

I got here a little early today, and after booting a violin-playing kid out of my teaching space – nice that you’re practising in your free periods mate, but fuck off out of my space – I decided to do the tea lady run. This school is the only one I work at that provides plunger coffee and has a staffroom just for instrumental staff. It is so nice to be looked after in that way. Anyway, tea lady Vic takes the coffees and the biscuits to the various friends and comes back in time to teach student number one… Only to find out that he’s on exchange in France for the next five weeks. Hence Vic is writing a blog post instead.

I find it difficult to get into a full-blown rant. Sure, there’s stuff that pisses me off. But usually I can get over it. Or I come to write about it, and realise that I just don’t have the head for useful facts, therefore any ranting will sound uninformed and like a whingeing idiot.

But here’s something that does piss me off immensely. This entire school has goon wireless. I could be sitting here with my notebook, connected to the internet as I type this post. I had this in mind when I bought the notebook – I made sure that it had wireless built in. But what pisses me off is that this school is a Mac school. I don’t have problems with Macs, in fact I like them. I just prefer this notebook, which isn’t a Mac. And the school is a discriminating school. In fact I find that this happens with a lot of the Mac users I’ve met. I couldn’t care less what type of computer a person uses, but these people insist on having this whole Oh, just go to the dock and Oh, right, you’re not on a Mac or You’re having problems? That’s because you’re not on a Mac. Fuck off. It’s discrimination.

So back to the school being a Mac school. I have to pay $100 per year to install an antivirus program from the school so that I can use their wireless system. The actual use of the system is free. If I had a Mac, however, I wouldn’t have to install the antivirus stuff. Meaning I wouldn’t have to pay a cent. What makes me pissed off the most is they way they say it. If you had a Mac, you wouldn’t have to do it. Fuck off. And there is no way I’ll pay $100 for the ability to use the internet during my five hours of teaching on one day per week for roughly thirty weeks. No fucking way. I’ll just do what I need at home and stuff this discriminatory arsehole school. I shouldn’t be really using the net while I’m here anyway.

Well this post has taken me half an hour instead of fifteen minutes, but I’ve had the time to use up. Meanwhile Brass Man has been making elephant sounds on a trombone with a new student, and Sax/Clarinet lady has been doing swung duets with a student who has a tone like a newborn goose. Guitar man is sadly at the other end of the building, so I’m missing out on that part of the musical melange. Later on I will be sandwiched in between two piano teachers as well. More coffee now will help.