Okay, so I'm home a little early from work. Here's just a part of my day.
For the last three weeks I've been recuperating from a gastro - intestinal infection (stomach flu), two rounds. Because of this, my doctor told me I had to be off the meds for two weeks after the "action" (for lack of a better word) had finished because the infection tears apart the inner lining of your stomach.
So, last night, it had been a week since I had my last "round", so I took 1/2 of my dosage of one of my meds. Unfortunately, I awoke feeling really loopy. This takes the better part of the day to wear off.
7:00 am: I went to school (yes, I drove) feeling somewhat loopy to a morning meeting (7:30 am) being held in my computer lab because the district IT (information technology) was providing some training for the teachers, so I had all kinds of people from the district (and the entire school staff) stuffed into my computer lab. The IT people came just as the meeting was supposed to start, but there was a survey I needed the staff to take, so I handed that to them, for the staff to work on while our guests set up. Because I had questions fly from both IT staff and school staff, it was pandemonium.
At 8:00 am I have to go outside and start my morning crossing guard duty. Because the campus doesn't open for students until 8:15, I have to hold people off across the street until then (which usually has at least one disgruntled parent angry).
8:45 am: The last of the stragglers who either walk or get dropped off finally cross and I can go inside the computer lab and changed from my crossing guard outfit to my computer lab outfit. But before I could do that, I had to answer a call from a teacher who couldn't get her internet working on her computer. Thankfully some of the IT people were still there (pushing updates remotely from the lab to teacher computers), so when my efforts didn't pan out, I took the laptop to them and had them show me how to fix that. After that, I assisted the IT people with getting the last of the computers updated, which involved a trip to the portables to get one of the computers up and running.
9:10 am: I'm finally able to change into the lab assistant outfit 25 minutes late. :o) I got a call from my endodontist, I had a root canal scheduled for 11:00, but it got changed to 10:30, which meant I would not be able to get students called into the lab for make ups on their NWEA testing. I was already running late, and the students wouldn't have been able to finish the test, so I decided to forgo the make ups until next week.
10:00 am: I explain to the Office Manager at the school that my appointment got changed so I was leaving to go to my appointment. This is so that she knows the lab will be closed until I get back.
10:30 - 11:30 am: I have a nice appointment with the endodontist (I'm not being sarcastic about this, he is very, very good and a really nice man to talk to). The rest of his staff are equally capable and wonderful as well. I highly recommend him if you need to have a root canal done.
11:30 am: I leave the endodontist and stop off at Dairy Queen for a milk shake. It's a tradition that my mother created, that I always get a strawberry milkshake from Dairy Queen (no one else will do) after a dental appointment. The only time I cannot do this is if I leave with stitches in my mouth. Otherwise I still keep the tradition going. :o)
12:00 pm: I arrive back at school and realize that I will probably not be able to last there for very long once the novocain wears off, so I go to the classroom of a teacher who had asked me to help her with a powerpoint presentation she is preparing. She's adding a video that she knew I had to the presentation. I go to her room and work while she's teaching measurement to her wonderful first grade students. Then I asked her the all important question, where does she have the video located on her computer? The answer? I don't have it. I knew you did, so I thought I'd have you help me get it. Do you see where this is going? I went back to the lab, got the video on my personal laptop that I bring to school and use (the school district seems to think I don't need a laptop to work off of), and used the bluetooth to push the video from my computer to my teacher computer in the lab. The teacher computer has a program called Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) that can control the other apple computers on the network, whether it be a computer on campus or on another campus in the district. I used this computer to push the video onto the teacher computer so I can finish what she needed.
1:00 pm: I finish making the first 3 slides for this teacher, including the slide with the movie on it. Yes, I said making the slides, because she hadn't started making the slideshow yet. I also found a picture for slide #2 that she had also indicated that she needed and inserted that for her. This is the reason why I haven't been stressing too much about whether I have a job next year, I figure as long as people are asking me to do these things for them, it's job security.
1:30 pm: I change back into my crossing guard outfit and do the afternoon crossing guard duty. This is one of those things that is different from corporate america: in public school, you not only have your job, but you also have extra duties assigned to you to do. Some people monitor the cafeteria during lunches, others have playground duty during recess, others handle needed work either before school or after school. Everyone does it, whether you are a certified teacher or a classified employee.
2:00 pm: I get paged to come to the office, to find this same teacher is facilitating the afternoon staff meeting and needs help setting up the projector and speakers. Usually when people need for me to do stuff like this, they give me some advance notice. On some things I need more advance notice than others (such as needing to bring my camcorder to record a guest speaker). I was almost shut down and ready to leave for the day, as by this time the novocain had worn off and I was in pain. It ended up being a good thing I stayed, as they needed to play a dvd and this teacher's laptop had not been set up to play a dvd. This requires administrative passwords that I don't give out, so they would have had to call the IT department to have it taken care of, but it was faster for me to do it. After assisting with a different powerpoint and the dvd movie, they no longer needed my assistance so I left and went home.
4:00 pm: I'm home and getting on the computer, after having fed Rachel, eating lunch and taking a pain med for my mouth, and could sense something itchy under my shirt. After scratching a few minutes I reached under my shirt to see if there was something there irritating my skin to find I had spent the entire day with a dryer sheet underneath my top. This has been a long explanation of my day, but for some reason, after all of the places I've been and people I've seen today, I just had to laugh that I had a dryer sheet under my shirt the whole time.
