When Cleanliness is Next to Stalkiness

Oh, dear. I hate to bring this up. You all know how Val isn't one to complain. How she's a rah-rah, overly-optimistic, glass-is-half-full, silver-lining-finding ray of sunshine who occasionally shoots rainbows from special structures in her wrists like Spiderman shoots web. But I can't hold it in any longer. I try not to talk about work here most of the time. I need the advice of cooler heads. Folks on the outside looking in. I'm curious if my teacher friends will see the situation differently (that's not a good omen--I typed "differntly") than the laymen.

I think The Cleaner is out to get me.

The Cleaner has been with us for a couple of years now. The Cleaner replaced a kindly custodian who was great at visiting during your plan time, driving people home if a snowstorm overtook us, and would give folks the shirt off his back, and kids at the ballgame a dollar for snacks. The Cleaner is a bit more high-strung. A bit more conscientious about the duties entailed by the position. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Surfaces gleam. Dust screams and scrams when it sees The Cleaner coming. You can almost hear the theme song from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." I'm not sure, but I think, after hours, that The Cleaner may patrol the halls with a holster holding a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser on each hip. If The Cleaner was a cleaner...The Cleaner would be Fantastik.

Let the record show that the old custodian always told Val her room was the best one to clean. Yeah. I'm sure you think he said that to all the teachers. But I'm sure he was being honest with me. There were hardly ever any paper scraps on the floor. No candy or gum wrappers. No broken pencil pieces or spitwads. Every now and then we had a mudder. And occasionally there would be a dirty spot on the tile from when somebody got a bit overzealous with the Germ-X, and the floor blob gathered grime from passing soles. Every day seventh hour, I had my students straighten the rows of desks, lining them up on tile lines, and push in their chairs. This is my 26th year of teaching. I run a tight ship.

Three days last week, upon arrival at 7:25 a.m., I noticed that my furniture had been repositioned. This has happened intermittently throughout the year. The problem with this is that I must move 25 desks and 25 chairs back to their original positions. Students creep, you know. By the end of the day, those desks are two tiles off front, and two tiles off back. A tile is twelve inches. So we're talking two feet closer to the board, and two feet closer to the back bookcase. In the back row, students sprawl. They rear back and stretch their legs. Backpacks hang on the seat backs. We are hard-pressed to squeeze through the educational accoutrements piled about the pupils.

I know that The Cleaner knows where my desks and chairs go. They are lined up right more often than they are moved. On those three days in a row, the tastefully shoed feet of my desks were exactly four inches off each designated line. No, I did not measure. My discerning eye can judge 1/3 of a tile. That made the back row of the four rows a whole tile farther back. A foot off. That means the only way around the room is across the front. That is not ideal. One must constantly move, like a shark needing oxygen flowing over its gills to survive, in order to keep one's finger on the pulse of the classroom.

Growing tired of moving 25 desks and 25 chairs each morning, I entertained the thought of putting my furniture four inches forward each evening in order to make a point to The Cleaner that just that little bit of fudging makes a big difference in functionality. I put that thought on the back burner, because really, have you ever tried to teach 25 freshmen to unlearn desk feet positions and relearn new ones? Didn't think so. Then on Thursday, only the back row had been moved. There was a letter on my desk asking if we could discuss setting the desks farther apart, in order to facilitate dry-mopping. Let the record show that this configuration has been in effect at least four years, and a dry-mopping problem has never been mentioned before.

Val may be an overbearing blowhard, but she does not like confrontation. Nor does she like to see anybody's job made harder by her own doing. To place the furniture in the new configuration would be a hardship on Val for seven hours a day, less one plan period, and perhaps make The Cleaner's job a bit easier for 10 minutes per day. It's not like the desks are a toothpick-width apart to start with. There are two feet between chair feet. The short dust mop fits. The old custodian didn't even break stride as he went up and down the rows. Sure, sometimes he had to swish that mop sideways to grab an errant dust bunny, but the configuration was eminently doable. In addition, Val makes sure that on mopping day, which is different every couple of weeks, denoted by a note on my desk, that the kids stack the chairs on the desks, and move them farther apart so the legs don't snag the shoulders of The Cleaner. AND Val and The Pony put those chairs down the morning after mopping, and move all the desks into proper position.

Not wanting to overstep my bounds, I showed my building principal the note, and asked if I needed to adjust my furniture. He shook his head. Said that The Cleaner had brought up the matter with him, and that he told The Cleaner to ask me. Huh. I was tattled on by The Cleaner! For desks that have been in the same position for the whole time The Cleaner has worked here!

What you may not know is that The Cleaner also opens and scrubs my personal microwave, and has been known to put the caps on all my pens that I leave out on my desk overnight. When I told The Cleaner that a new desk design would not work for me, and commented that they are the same as they've been for four eyars, The Cleaner grew defense, and declared that since the beginning of the year, The Cleaner had wanted to bring this up. Oh, dear. Val is the bad guy for wanting her classroom to remain arranged to suit her needs.

It has gotten to the point that Val is somewhat afraid to cross The Cleaner. I don't want The Cleaner cleaning my microwave, and probably also my mini-fridge, but I'm afraid to say anything. Thursday, the students were dismissed at 1:00 for parent conferences. Teachers spent time working in their rooms until parents showed up. The Cleaner had my room swept, microwave wiped, and trash dumped by 2:00. HELLO! Val cannot go four hours without making trash! I have to blow my nose, you know. Especially after the vigorous dust-mopping while I was in the classroom. Then there was that half-bottle of Dr. Pepper left over from Tuesday's conferences. And the can of Beanie Weenies I brought to tide me over because nobody was bringin' pasta at 3:40 like on Tuesday.

Here's how bad it has become. Rather than throw my trash in the wastebasket like a normal person, I sealed up my Beanie Weenie can in a ziploc sandwich bag left over from lunch, and stuffed it in a Walmart sack with my used tissues and Dr. Pepper bottle and sugarless gum wrapper, and CARRIED IT HOME TO THROW AWAY! Yes! I was like an environmentally-friendly hiker packing my crap out of Yellowstone.

Somebody has their priorities wrong, methinks.

It is Val?