You want a lunch break? Hah!
ARGH! I am not happy young man right now, so apologies in advance if this degenerates into a nonsensical raving tirade against the teaching profession, and molly-coddling head teachers!
As you may remember from a previous blog, we in the IT department have been forced to post a sign outside our door, and lock the office in order to take our unpaid lunch break. We need to take these measures because otherwise unthinking, self-absorbed teachers wander in and expect (and in most cases demand) that you give up your unpaid lunch time to come and solve a problem for them. The look of dismay on their faces when they realised that the door was firmly locked (they have no keys to our department), and that no-one was coming to answer their knocking was truly pitiful. The despair in their eyes that they may have to go for an entire hour without someone from IT to hold their hand as they dealt with complicated matters like turning projectors on and off, sending emails, and writing Word documents… well, to say it sickens me wouled be something of an understatement. After all, we’re paying these people to educate the next generation of the Human Race, and they can barely call themselves computer literate (this includes - most damningly - the two IT Teachers)!
So, anyway, we lock the door. A few weeks back, we hear mutterings that one of the IT teachers - we’ll call her Mary - is annoyed that she can’t contact us during our unpaid lunch break. We hear that at least one other teacher agrees that it is an inconvenience. We pay it no mind, since any sensible person can understand why we have been forced o take these measures. And besides, out of the eight and a half hours we’re here, there’s only one hour we’re incommunicado. And that’s during the school lunch break anyway, so there’s no lessons going on that need our attention.
But alas, it appears the mutterings of that poor, unfortunate teacher have reached the ears of our ‘benign’ (read as: incompetent) overlord - the school Principal. And Heaven forbid that a teacher should be anything less than ecstatic about their work here - regardless of what that teachers happiness may do to the rest of the staff. You see, our Principal labours under the mistaken belief that his teaching staff are made of blown glass, have rays of sunshine radiating from their bottoms, and can do no wrong. He has successfully created an atmosphere in which Teachers are the ruling elite whose merest whims should be considered commands, whilst the rest of us are subservient underlings, beneath contempt, and only of any value as long as we are pleasing some moronic teacher.
So when these mutterings that the lowly IT staff were taking their full unpaid lunch break with no concern for Mary not being able to find the power button on a classroom projector….
So my boss walks in this morning, gathers us all ’round, and we all knew it was going to be bad when his opening line was “You’re not gonna like this, but it’s been decided…”. And as it turns out, what has been decided by the Principal and his coterie of lack wits is that we can no longer lock the door, nor display our sign. And we have to stagger our lunch breaks by half hour each. Aside from the unthinking bias of this decision, it’s also inherently flawed; it relies upon teachers exercising a modicum of courtesy and/or sense.
Allow me to explain. From now on between the hours of 12pm and 2pm, there will be a maximum of two members of the IT staff working. At one point there will only be one of us working. What this means, is that when a teacher comes waltzing in through the gloriously un-obstructing door into our office, they will be dealt with by whomever is working at that point. No problems so far, but here is where the whole thing begins to unravel; imagine all the technicians working at particular time are busy, or have been called away from the office (as is often the case). A teacher comes wandering in, and the only person left in the office is the chap having his lunch, during his unpaid lunch break. ninety-nine point nine percent of the teaching staff here will automatically expect the technician to stop enjoying his unpaid lunch break and see to their problem post haste.
And this in turn will lead to more problems - namely that if that technician munching on his sarnies happens to be me, and a teacher approaches me my one and only response will be “I’m on lunch - wait ’til one of the others is available”. Which will instantly send the teacher either into a state of shock that one of the mere support staff could talk to them so, or send them scurrying to the Principal demanding my head on a spike!
Grrrrrr…. this whole situation is just the latest thing like this to happen here. The best example was the Teachers union strike action on Thursday. All across the UK, teachers downed chalk and rulers, and took to the streets over pay disputes. Except here. Why? Well, I can tell you no it wasn’t out of concern for the disruption they’d cause. No, it was because the teaching staff here are already over paid - and that’s not vitriol and conjecture on my part - it is a fact, spoken by one of the teachers themselves! This school pays comfortably over the odds for it’s teachers here, usually to the detriment of the support staff salaries (I’ve recently been made aware that my salary is about £3000 below the going rate for my job), and there’s no way they’re going to bring that into dispute because their colleagues at other schools feel ‘under-valued’!
One thing you may have noticed is the word unpaid. Our lunch break here is and unpaid one, which means that we are not actually working during that one hour period. We are supposedly free to do what we want in that hour. What it actually means is that we end up working for free! If this thing goes the way I think it’s going to go, then I shall be taking my lunch breaks off site. I’ll either go sit by my car, or head into town, so that there’s no way they can get me. Bit sad that we’re being chased off site, just so that we can eat our lunch in peace….
I shall finish this now, because the more I think about it, the more annoyed I’m getting, and the more likely it is that the next teacher I see will get a mouthful of abuse….
TTFN
