The week of my return to school after my Thailand jaunt was just horrible. My friend returned to South Africa late Monday night and the kids were just unruly and unbearable. Perhaps they were itching for a vacation and so was I (even though I had just returned from Thailand). Every kid had to comment on how black I was or how ugly I looked because I was sooooo black. Haven’t you little midget bastards heard of getting a tan?????

I had no interest in suffering through Friday (which is my worst day of classes – no interest in facing off with Puddin Face and Peppermint Patty or the messy Tidy or the stinky kid named Pooh. So I devised a plan to rid myself of Friday (Jan. 31st) and the horrible cafeteria cleaning practice of throwing soapy water on the floor during lunch so teachers and students have to tiptoe through puddles of soapy water and try not to slip on the wet tiles. There was no way I was going to let this rotten school ruin the end of my year!

Monday night, before my friend left I told her I was going to “slip and fall” in one of puddles of soapy water and call in sick on Friday. She laughed hysterically as I did a Dick Van Dyke style fall on her floor. She told me to make sure I throw my tray in the air so it will crash down making a big noise. We laughed and laughed before we said our final good-byes.

The next day – Jan. 30th, I was eating lunch. The cafeteria workers came around in their usual fashion – carrying a bucket of soapy water and a bowl. They would dip the bowl into the bucket and throw a bowl-full of soapy water on the tiled floor right in the aisles between the tables where the teachers and students were eating and continue their wet trail to the exit door. They don’t mop, they just leave the puddles. I guess they come back after everyone has tracked through the puddles leaving wet footprints on their way to the tiled stairs and then mop up the puddles…but who knows???? Often the water splashes your shoes or in my case a few times my computer bag. I had just had enough of this ridiculous practice. At first I was nervous and not sure if I was really going to do it, but as I walked away from my table the devil on my shoulder said, “Do it now!”

So I did my best Dick Van Dyke fall. I let one leg fly into the air, threw my tray up and to the side so the dirty metal dishes (prison style not Martha Stewart) and chopsticks crashed on the floor next to me. They were strategically thrown so they would not land on me and soil my clothes. I have a strong core from all of my Pilates classes so I was able to lower my body to the floor with one leg in the air so it was quite a dramatic drop. The clanking of the dishes pulled focus from my slow-motion fall. Lots of teachers came running over to help me up. I had to lower my face so they could not see the glee in my eyes. I slowly limped out of the cafeteria. When I got to my classroom, I sent an email to the school administration reporting that I had fallen in the cafeteria due to the soapy water puddles that the cleaning staff threw on the floor. I received no response.

The next day, I called in sick saying that my back had been injured in the fall. I then started my campaign to stop this Puddle Gate – it was a slippery slope, but someone had to go down it.

I got an email from admin saying that they could not change the practice because the school would not invest in new cleaning equipment. I blasted back that it cost nothing to tell the staff to wait until after all diners had exited the cafeteria before throwing puddles of water on the floor. That was too much for them to understand because I got no response. I sent another message detailing how the practice should stop. I even went so far as to offer to scan a few pertinent pages from a manual on safe cleaning practices, load them into a PowerPoint presentation, call a meeting where I would read the pages to the school administration. That was a bitchy way of jabbing at their meeting style, which is just that. Hours of projecting pages from books on education theory and then standing at a podium reading them verbatim — no thought added just reading what was copied.

I then received an email back asking how they could fix the problem without it costing anything. So I again wrote, “STOP THROWING PUDDLES OF WATER ON THE TILED FLOOR WHEN PEOPLE ARE STILL EATING!”

They must have gotten the message because at the end of the day a school-wide email was sent that the cleaning staff would wait until 12:30/1:00pm before starting to clean the floors. Another small victory for the village idiot!!!!!!!