the furniture wars

First and foremost: I'm alive!

That much was probably obvious. Less obvious has been that I'm still teaching. In fact, I'm teaching the perfect tenses right now, and Greek mythology, and how to craft a strong thesis and write a timed essay in under 40 minutes. So I'm doing all types of real teaching, as opposed to the BS-y fake teaching I did last year. This is not to say that I'm doing any of it well, but they say that comes in the third year.

The big drama at work is furniture-centric right now. It's sparked hours of ranting and raving, so I'll try to pare down to the bare minimum here. What you need to know is: our desks suck, and they suck hard. So, the five of us in the farthest-back rooms have fought and wheedled and coerced and gotten tables for most of our rooms, which rule.

About a week before the winter mini-break, we get this memo saying we are getting BRAND NEW DESKS AND CHAIRS for students and teachers and every single room that coming Wednesday!

Pause right here and remember that my school holds about 3600 students at any given time. How many desks and chairs is that, to move in one day?

So they give us these little paper signs, about five flourescent orange reading REMOVE and five flourescent pink reading DO NOT REMOVE. They are only for student and teacher desks as - this will become important - nothing else is to be removed at this time. I take it upon myself to coordinate the five rooms and make sure everything is labeled how it needs to be; this takes about half a day with all the attendant copying, taping, and phoning of off-track people, as we rotate these rooms in "pods" of three teachers for any given pair of rooms. This makes sense in a track-school kind of way and someday, if you are very lucky, I will explain it.

All through break I can't sleep for these vivid and recurring nightmares that I will come back to my room and it will be empty, or that my huge beautiful library tables will have been traded in for cheapie uncomfortable desks. When we come back and I find my room untouched, I am hugely relieved. Riley's room, next door, is a little different. They've taken out her 40 student desks and replaced them with 30 new ones. They've left her teachers' desk, as requested, but they have also put in a new teacher's desk, upside down, next to it. She puts in a maintenance request, but nobody comes for it.

Cool.

A week later, Friday afternoon, and we're still in our rooms at 5:00 for some god-unknown reason. Good thing, because some dude in a coverall sticks his head in and is like, "I'm here about the new furniture?"

Whaaa?

So we are insistent. We DO NOT want new furniture. We watch as he writes DO NOT REMOVE EXISTING FURNITURE in caps all across the instructions on the door. As an added precaution, I leave Mr. Junior Bacon Cheeseburger with what I hope is the cheerful but stern message, "Thank you for NOT removing my tables!" We leave feeling fairly secure that our directions are clear.

Come Tuesday, we enter through my room, where everything is still aces. Riley's room, however, now contains 40 student desks, her old teacher desk, her new upside-down teacher desk, and still a third teacher desk, shoved into the back corner of the room, blocking the fridge, microwave, and door into my room. Mysteriously missing is this amazing wooden table that I swore on several holy books that I would protect as it belonged to our insane dean. This is another story, and a pretty good one at that, but just now the (table-shaped) hole in my heart is too fresh a wound. I have been in alternate stages of denial and rage about it all week. That was my perch, man. My perch.

Riley is more or less just livid. We spend half an hour before school moving seven student desks and one teacher desk outside. The other one is too deep in the room, and too heavy to turn right-side-up. We throw a tablecloth over it, and it slumbers there still. She makes another maintenance request. From this we learn:
-Maintenance is angry that the new desks are outside, regardless of the fact that her room was so crowded we physically could not move around.
-We had been scheduled, all along, to receive our new furniture in this second wave. This second wave that not one teacher in the entire school was informed of.
-Riley's first set of new desks, then, was not actually supposed to be hers. It was in her room as "storage," despite the fact that her room is clearly in use, and that we are literally next door to a completely empty, abandoned wood shop.
-When they came the second week, they did not just add 10 desks. They took out the 30 desks "stored" in her room and put in 40 brand-new ones.
-My perch has been taken to salvage.
-As we were told all furniture taken from those rooms went to salvage, we can only assume this includes the 30 week-old desks that were removed to make way for this fresh batch.

Mr. JBC says: