Photocopy Fun (Hardly!)

Today's weather: High = 5 Low = -3
Sunny

Gosh I've never been so longing for a holiday as now. The cold weather continues relentlessly, and the students are all writing their mid-semester exams starting tomorrow. Contrary to how you'd think this would work, this is hardly the time to sit back and relax and look forward to the Thailand break while the students now slug it out with the tests. Exam times are frantic for both parties, and both parties can easily lose their cool.

So my tests were all generated over the weekend and sent off to the photocopy guy today, only to find out he was absent. This guy took a day off during the busiest photocopy time of the year. The whole office was shut down with a notice in Chinese saying 'Do not Enter'

As any teacher would know, the photocopy service is the lifeblood of the school. If you take that out, you're just asking for trouble. Then again, the photocopying all year has been sketchy to say the least and has caused a lot of frustration. With so many good things about where I work in a top school, the photocopying is one of the few things I can actually complain about -- yet today was a real blow.

They managed to cobble up a substitute person to work the rooms, and I took advantage of the opportunity in the early afternoon to drop off all my math and calculus exams.

As soon as I walked in there, I saw the substitute woman in charge, and politely requested 45 copies of each exam to be made. She ripped into me, scowled, and basically chewed me out on the spot about why she wasn't going to make my copies. The gist of it was come back tomorrow, it's too late, and she ain't doing it. She then went back to her business of cutting up tiny little slips of paper in Chinese using the cutting board. Meanwhile, the copy machine remained unused, and there were stacks, and stacks, and stacks of backlogged exams from the other teachers.

Basdially I was the last in a series of foreign teachers that day who had dropped off exam copies, despite all the signs in Chinese saying not to enter and that the room was out of commission for the entire day. They played innocent, or frankly they were innocent. But then I waltzed in speaking Chinese, and she saw that as an opportunity to blame me for being part of this crowd

There are days like today when I wish I couldn't speak, read, or understand a word of Chinese -- and that my abilities of learning this language could be erased.

But thanks to a photocopy shop on the other side of the city, I was able to get the whole exams done within half an hour for a decent price, and enjoy a nice bicycle ride and exercise to boot.