Why My Job is Better than Yours

Maybe I just want to believe that what I am doing is worthwhile.  Maybe I look at my friends with their real jobs and their big paychecks and their car insurance (which of course would allow them to fix their new lease cars if they were to say, I don’t know, drive into something large and furry and that rhymes with my favorite beverage.)  Or maybe I really am having the time of my life substitute teaching in rural Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.  Anyway you look at it, I’m still going to write about why my job is better than yours.  Without further ado . . .

Monday Night at the Farm Presents:

Top Five reasons why subbing is better than actually having a real job.

Number 5:  Remember when you were young and you would see snow on the ground when you woke up and you would hope and pray that the busses wouldn’t be able to run, and that it would be declared a snow day.  Or your parents wouldn’t wake you up and you would get to sleep in.  It would be your chance to watch Bob Barker go gray gracefully on “Price is Right”, or catch up on reruns of “Three’s Company”.  Well substitute teaching is a lot like that.  You see, I get called in the morning, that is my alarm, and every once in a while they just don’t need me, and it’s my own little snow day in the middle of October.  Oh yeah and I still get all of those holiday’s off, you know, the ones we’re always griping about because the post office is closed, and just the other day we had a half day.  Remember half days?  And for absolutely no reason what so ever.

Number 4:  Recess:  How many lawyers do you know that get to go outside for thirty minutes and play four square?  When you sub you get to go out for recess and leave all of the paper work for the real teachers.  The other day I went outside with my third graders and actually played red rover.  A game I haven’t played since the accident at Pierce school in October of 1989.  It all stared when the girls asked Ben Cunningham the come on over, Ben bent at the waist and sprinted screaming.  Sloan Dewese and Lisa Mark both panicked and simply let go of each other’s hands.  Ben feeling no contact kept running until he slammed into the wall with his head.  Lisa started to hyperventilate and nearly passed out, Ben started bleeding from the head, Kevin Carlson said something mean and Sloan slapped me across the face because I laughed.  In this particular game, I was not called over.

Number 3:  Never really in the same place twice.  Why is that good you ask?

No real boss:  I have a new principal everyday, and I haven’t even met them all.  I talk to the secretary for, like, ten minutes, and then I’m the boss for the rest of the day.  What I say goes.  I have all the power.  I am GOD.  Err, but I certainly wouldn’t let it go to my head.

No grades:  As far as I’m concerned these kids all get A’s, I don’t have to destroy poor Jimmy just because he can’t figure out what comes after the letter ‘a’ or thinks 2+2 = giraffe.

My name is always a kick.  I always seem to be either Mr. Applebee’s (plural and all) or Mr. Bee, or in some cases Mr. Dog, Hey Dude, and Teacher Guy.  Yes, I really demand the respect of my students.

I get to break all of the little school rules I always thought were dumb.  I had my kids watching T.V. while sitting by whom ever they wanted, eating candy.  That’ll teach Mrs. Crispen to leave me lesson plans next time.

What could possibly be the downside to this?  Well a while back I had first graders.  And I don’t know if you all know this, but first grade girls look a lot like first grade boys, and really vice versa.  So when they have names like Jesse and Pat and Sam and well actually I was sure Abbi was a boy with really cruel parents, you just have to guess.  Unfortunately, there was that time I guessed wrong, and called Jesse a boy.  To make it worse the whole class heard and everyone said, “But Jesse is a girl.”  Right.  So what do you say to that?

Number 2: Not retail:  Really that’s all I have to say about that.

And the number 1 reason:  Retirement account:  That’s right, even though I don’t have a real job; I still have real retirement benefits.  Of course I don’t make enough money for it to ever help me but back off.

The depressing part is that when they asked me who I wanted as my primary benefactor I couldn’t think of a single person who was making less money than me where my retirement benefits would actually help in the case of my untimely demise.  I really didn’t want to be that guy.

Worst Monday Night Football commercial: Butlers perform stomp with Rubbermaid step stools.  Amazingly it was still more exciting than the first quarter of the game. 

I haven’t been sleeping very well lately because Cane has now taken to snoring barking and whining in his sleep, apparently he’s having a rash of bad dreams, so not only am I utterly alone in life, I’m still getting all the negatives of living with a snorer.  The worst part is that I really want to know what he’s dreaming about, but of course I can never find out, you know because he’s a dog and all, and everybody knows that dogs never remember their dreams.  (Is snorer a word, and if not how do you say ‘one who snores’?)

Yeah so I got to be Mr. Fireman Charlie Guy, well more like Mr. Probee Fireman Charlie, when my dog treed a cat.  While I was proud of the dog, I actually felt a little bad for the cat, it was all up in the tree and scared and drooling.  So I brought my dog in so he could leave.  But then like four hours later I looked outside and the cat was still in the tree.  So I got the ladder and climbed up there and got him out.  Sure he hissed and tried to hold on to the tree and then ran away without thanking me or anything, but I know inside of him somewhere he’s just a little grateful. 

Little known fact:  A ladybug frying on a halogen lamp smells like peanut butter.

This weeks strangest late night invention: It’s a tie between the Patriotic Postman, a mailbox that has a spring loaded flag telling you that the mail is there, and the Can Around, a device you put in your refrigerator to organize pop cans.  The thought that someone might actually make money on these ridiculous ideas is almost depressing as the fact that at two in the morning while alone on a sixty acre farm in the middle of freaking nowhere, they still sounded really, really good.

See you next week.  Where Monday Night will talk about the perfect family Thanksgiving dinner, and then explains why mine wasn’t anything like that.