A play by me. Well, plagiarized by me…
The scene: Hans Gruber, played by Secretary Paulson, has hatched a scheme to steal $700 billion dollars from the Federal Reserve. He’s chatting with his evil genius kid Theo, played by Ben Bernanke, who has just informed Gruber that he’s in place, he can move the money, but he can’t get it out of the bank, the last seal is impenetrable.
I saw the President’s speech last night. Sounded a lot like he said, “The sky is falling!” This morning, I saw Senator McCain say he came back to Washington because this is a situation for “all hands on deck.” Soon as I heard that, I switched from CNN to C-Span to see what “all hands on deck” looks like. What I saw was a Representative in a nearly empty chamber, discussing the pardon of some guy who was wrongfully convicted due to race, followed by later a discussion of forests in the Pacific west. Maybe it’s just me, but it didn’t look like there were any emergencies happening. Unfortunately, I don’t get the other C-Span channels thanks to local county politics giving Comcast a monopoly here.
Thank You To My Great Teachers
While I’m thinking about it, I want to list the great teachers in my life:
1st Grade: Mrs. Countess – I don’t remember a whole lot about first grade, I remember my best friend was Shane, the only boy in the class with long hair, the rest of us having crew cuts. But I remember that Mrs. Countess was nice, even when I got in trouble.
3rd Grade: Mrs. Teague (formerly Ms. Seacrest, she got married while I was in her class.) – Instead of letting me be bored in class while they learned long division, she gave me more advanced math lessons personally.
21 years later I was picking up my oldest son from that very same school and passed by an open classroom to see one Mrs. Teague standing there teaching a new 3rd grade class. I stood in the doorway to watch and wondered if she would even remember me. She stopped her lecture to ask me, “Can I help you?” I told her that I had been a 3rd grader in her class many years ago and was glad to see her. She told me that she didn’t remember me. Oh well, a couple decades is a long time…
The next afternoon, as I walked by her door, she snatched my arm and pulled me into her classroom. “I’m sorry about that yesterday, I had those damn teacher evaluation people in here and I needed to get rid of you quick! Of course I remember you Gary! No one would forget the best student they ever had!”
I can’t believe I was the “best student ever”. I do recall her locking me out of her classroom to keep me from beating my nemesis, Tommy, to death once… We talked for a long time, I found out that she was retiring after that year and that my oldest son’s teacher was her assistant from the year before. I also found out that Mr. Teague had died earlier that year.
Every kid should get at least one Mrs. Teague in their life.
4th Grade Mathematics: Mrs Wilson – Not only did she have really hot legs (4th grade was about the time I discovered girls were great…) she also recognized that I already knew what she was teaching the class. So instead of mathematics, she taught me electronics.
7th Grade Advanced Algebra/Geometry: Mrs Aldridge – She had a short class of about a dozen super geek math students. She also didn’t send us packing when we pulled our weekly pranks on her, like turning the entire classroom backward while she was out…
10th Grade Advanced Biology: Mrs. Franklin – Yet another teacher who could handle pranks. One of these was elaborate enough to deserve a separate posting, more on that later. Mid year, catalogs selling geek teeshirts went around, one of which contained pretty much the entire answer key for one of her upcoming exams on the internal organs of a bull frog. When she said she would make us remove those shirts on exam day, someone asked, “What if it’s a girl wearing it?” She decided wearing the shirt was an automatic D then. We were hoping for the other option… Sadly the shirts didn’t arrive in time anyway.
10th Grade Analysis / Precalculus: Mr. Bruhwel – This is an odd one, because he truly hated me. Seriously, hated me. But he was a good teacher and his class was a good one, and backed up by what I think was the best math textbook I’ve ever seen, which (since I stole it…) is sitting right behind me on my desk, more than a quarter century later: Modern Introductory Analysis by Dolciani, Beckenbach, Donnelly, Jurgensen and Wooton. I’m convinced I can teach six year olds algebra via the lessons in this book. I’m working on the Munchkin with it already.
10th Grade Latin: Ms Rogers – Yet another teacher I was hot for… which may be the main reason I remember her. However, I did learn a little Latin… Te amo.
11th Grade Advanced Chemistry: Mr. Pascal – He also had a great textbook, sadly I didn’t steal it so I don’t remember what the name was or who wrote it. He was also VERY understanding. His class was at 7:30 AM and at the time I was not a morning person. (Oddly enough I’m like a fricken farmer now, I get up at 6:30 AM and I’m working by 6:50 AM every morning…) I showed up for the first 4 days of his class. He announced that our entire semester grade would come from the exam at the end of the semester. So, I went home, slept in, and read the book.
I showed up for the exam, four months later. At first I thought he didn’t notice me in the class, since he didn’t send me packing to the office. The exam was 10 questions, which at first glance didn’t seem like much to grade an entire semester. I barely finished the exam in the alloted 70 minutes. It was the most intense exam short of some college exams that I had ever taken. In short, yes, I’m a geek, I loved it.
I showed up the next day to see my grade. He handed the graded tests back to us so he could go over them with the class. I got a 98, not perfect due to a small math error. I had time to check the math on less than half the test before time was up, I was a little surprised that was the only math error. Again he seemed to take no notice of me in his class.
The bell rang and as he usually did, stood up, “Class dismissed. All except you Mr. H.” Oh crap, he did notice me… What followed was one of the most interesting conversations I’d had in my short school life.
“Have a seat,” he says and I sat in the chair by his desk. “Do you know that I currently have 180 plus students this year taking my course?” I shook my head no, and he continued, “All those students took the same exam yesterday. Of all those students, two of them scored the highest score, you and Mr. M” (Mr. M. was my best friend and sat right beside me in the class.) “Had I not been closely watching you, I would have bet that you had been copying from Mr. M. However, I know that you didn’t. Certainly you both worked out the problems differently and his little math error was in an entirely different place.”
I guess I was grinning, cause he seemed appropriately annoyed as he went on, “Clearly, you have a strong interest in chemistry, since the last time I saw you was in September, it would seem that someone else has done an excellent job teaching you the subject. I would like to know who that was.”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that question, cause no one had actually taught me, the book was fairly self explanatory. “Um no one taught me, well, I guess technically it was you, but all I did was take the book home and read it.”
“You read the whole book?” He seemed shocked.
“Yes.”
“And you understood it all?”
“Yes.”
He then asked me a question, or rather asked me how I would go about solving what would have been an exam question from the back of the book, I don’t remember the question, but I do remember it had to do with nuclear chemistry. He seemed pleased with my answer. “That’s amazing. We wouldn’t cover half this book in the whole school year. And no one helped you?… Ok, now I want to know why you haven’t showed up for my class? Is it that it’s too boring? Too old for what you clearly already know?”
By default, I’m a fairly honest (some would say brutally) guy so I pretty much laid it out, “Well, you told us that our entire grade came from the final exam, so I figured if I could read the book I could just take the test. And I don’t like getting up early in the morning.”
He thought about that for a minute and said, “Well, I wish you would have told me that before. I’m going to give you a B for the semester. It would have been an A, but I can’t reward you for skipping class. In fact, if anyone finds out that you skipped that many classes I’ll get in trouble for having graded you at all. Now about showing up for my class, there is more to chemistry than there is in that book, suppose I get you transferred to a later class? It would have to be one of the 12th grade classes, but I’m sure I can talk them into it.”
The hair stood up on the back of my neck. Seeing as how, due to some computer error in scheduling (did I mention that I learned Fortran the year earlier?…), I had both lunch periods, I really didn’t want anyone from the head office mucking around looking too closely at my schedule. So I politely declined the offer.
It didn’t matter, I dropped out entirely, opting for work over school, later that year. All this sounds like bragging and it is (“It ain’t braggin’ if you done it.” – Will Rogers) but it is nothing to brag about. The simple fact is, I made some of the most incredibly stupid decisions of my life at that time, this was one one of them. Here was a great teacher, willing to take a bullet for me, and I declined the offer because I wanted to sleep in and eat lunch for two hours. Stupid is as stupid does… and I was always doing things.
College – Advanced Business Programming in COBOL: Alan Sizemore – It’s not so much that he did anything truly great for me, because for me, like most college classes, I just did the work and got graded in his class. But he was memorable because he was a brutally honest guy and had the guts to say something that no one else would say. In those college classes there were a pair of Indian women who were dumber than a sack of hammers. Everyone learned to avoid them when they came looking for help after trying to help them once, because it was impossible. For me I tried several times, thinking that language was a barrier here, but sadly, I became convinced they were just not bright enough to do this kind of work. After yet another wasted hour of in-class lecture time trying to explain something to them that they should have already known and were obviously never going to understand, only to find out that they had both failed, three times, the prerequisite courses for his class, he told them quite bluntly, they should seek education in another field. Despite that, I do know that he spent MANY hours after classes trying to teach those women programming, though I doubt he was ever successful.
E.W.
It occurred to me while I was writing about this. Mr. Pascal graded all 180 of those exams overnight. It must have taken all night to pull that off, those exams were not multiple choice and I recall my answers spanning at least three pages. That’s dedication.
© 2012 Evil Wordsmith. Evilwordsmith.com. All Rights Reserved.
We’re all sick here. My Queen, the Prince and me, not so much, thank you Linus Pauling and your massive dose of vitamin C idea. We are also about out of Dimetap for kids, so off to the store I went yesterday to get some. As I picked up the box of it, I was reminded of something that I saw about a year ago.
Parents all know that the hardest part of getting a kid to take medicine is the taste of it. That’s why our particular cough medicine works, it doesn’t taste bad. Last time I was shopping for it though, I came upon a mother and her sick kid in the grocery store. I saw her scratch the box with her fingernail and sniff it and then offer it for her kid to smell as well. A marketing genius, you guessed it, our nemesis the Design Guy, put a scratch and sniff patch on the box so people could see what it smelled like.
I warned the mother, even though it was too late for her and her kid, “You do realize that every sick kid in the county has probably already stuck their nose to that little patch?”
With widened eyes, she said, “I didn’t think of that.”
I bought the bottle that was in the very back, the one with no scratch marks on it. I’m pretty cynical in general and especially about marketing types, but this seems too evil even for marketing types. It has to be the work of the Design Guy.
E.W.
Speaking of the taste of medicine, why can’t someone make me some toothpaste that tastes like steak. Maybe Japanese steakhouse flavor with a little wasabi kicker…
So, being in the fire prevention business, I am one of those people who used to actually test the smoke detectors in the house regularly. By that I mean, I go and look at it, see that the little green light is on saying the battery is ok and then press the test button to hear it sound off.
Back before My Queen, I lived very compactly. As in one 15’x10′ room. Being a technical kind of guy, creature comforts were never a big deal to me. In that room, was my TV, stereo, bed, my office chair and desk and computers. I lived, slept and worked in there for a decade. Only thing it didn’t have was a kitchen, for that, I had to travel down the hall to another room.
This started after I finally got smart enough to leave my first wife. Being fairly poor I rented my old bedroom from Mom. Later, she moved out to live with her boyfriend and I had the whole house to myself. Much to the irritation of my buddies, I didn’t spread out to the rest of the house. I liked compact.
So, one night I go into the kitchen and put me on a pot of spinach, which was halfway between a meal and a snack in my thinking. I had a craving. The phone rings, it’s business, my favorite customer. He likes me a lot and he likes to talk, so we talked as usual for quite a while. Long enough for me to get sidetracked from the task at hand.
I’ll get to the smoke detector in a minute. First I have to tell you about my recent re-encounter with a Design Guy device that is so old it proves that he’s been around mucking stuff up far longer than the Unabomber. This evil technology is called the TORX screw.
Some time last week, the cable that supports the tailgate on My Queen’s ’95 Bronco broke. She was taking her Mustang in to Ford for a handful of repairs that only the dealer can make (I felt a great disturbance in the force, it was as if thousands of dollar bills cried out in agony and then were silenced into someone else’s bank account.) and she asked me if I wanted to let them fix this. Hell no I said, it’s 4 bolts and I don’t even have to do any kind of contortion to reach them.
After buying the cables for 44 bucks EACH (It’s an 18 inch piece of 3/16 galvanized aircraft cable with a couple of crimped on eyes, I was expecting it to be high priced at around 15 bucks…) I was DAMN sure that I didn’t want Ford to make this repair. So I buy the cables.
Well, if you’ve been anxiously waiting for my first posting, please, make sure you take your meds immediately. Speaking of meds, if you have read this far here’s the legal info: I am not responsible for anything anywhere, don’t come suing me Jack. If you are still reading, note that you will not get your previous 2 minutes back, no refunds. At this point if you’re still here, then I would like to point out that there are fine psychiatric professionals who can probably help you.
Ok… still here? Welcome, there’s no hope for you. You may as well read on.
This is a place where I intend to bitch. A lot. Loudly. My significant other has stopped listening to it so I figured I’d shoot it out into cyberspace. Quote my five year old: “If Daddy is gonna be this grumpy, he should go back to bed.” I hate it when people make me laugh while I’m mad.
I also intend to expose the work of the most evil man on earth, and since no one knows his name I’m calling him: The Design Guy. His workings are insidious, they hit you slowly and from every angle and every where, such that you don’t consciously notice it. But it’s there, like a spray of automatic weapons fire in slow motion. In these posts, I’ll expose him and his evil work so that everyone can see him.
Welcome
A simple place to share the thoughts, musings, observations and sometimes rants of an Evil Wordsmith and his Queen, my best friend and love of my life Springwolf.
Sometimes you may agree. Sometimes you might discover observations or information about things you never knew, and sometimes you might even grow angry; if not by the words, but by the story. We will strive to make you think, laugh, contemplate and enjoy a little entertainment.
So come back again as Evil shares his thoughts, musings, contemplations, and evil words. As the average american business man who is just trying to squeak out a living.
© 2006 Evil Wordsmith. Evilwordsmith.com. All Rights Reserved.