Your Tax Dollars at Work

I've been pretty lousy at posting regularly of late. I'm just slammed at school. It's always like this at the beginning of the year: meeting after meeting (covering the same things that they did last year), paperwork, training of the darlings, and of course, more meetings. So you can imagine my distress when I sat down in yet another meeting after school one day labeled "Mandatory" on my email notification only to find my favorite thing getting ready to transpire: an icebreaker. As mentioned earlier this year, I detest icebreakers. This feeling of bitterness multiplies when said icebreaker is labeled "Mandatory" and takes up my valuable after school planning time. Let me tell you how it all went down.

1. I wearily pulled out my child-size library chair and collapsed into it. Began feverishly jotting notes to my teammates about all of the things we had to do after this Very Important Meeting (VIM).
2. Perky person from office who has not been around ten year olds all day bounces onto the scene. She is chipper and makes several lame attempts to get us to echo her in a school cheer. We look at her. And not very nicely.
3. Frisky McPerkyson unveils what she has clearly been working on all day in her office. It is a collection of detailed hand-drawn lipsticks in various shapes.
4. I stare without shame at her with my best "Get a job!" expression on my face.
5. We are then subjected to an explanation of how the form that your lipstick takes is an indicator of your personality. This is somehow related to my job of teaching fourth grade. The men on our staff were even less fascinated that we were, which is hard to imagine.
6. We all have to troop to the front and put a sticky note with our name under the lipstick that best matches our own. No thought is even given to the fact that not one of us has a speck of lipstick left on our faces at 4:00 on a Monday afternoon.
7. With great demonstrative efforts, Frisky proceeds to do the Big Reveal on what each lipstick shape represented and who shared personalities on our staff. Because the scientific evidence lurking behind this internet forward is so staggering, I feel certain that we as a team would not have survived one more day without this valuable bit of wisdom.
8. Then we were dismissed. For real. And people wonder why I'm cranky.