Job~ma to Tom and dental~ma to Shir.

For those who were wondering, Time Warner Cable customer service still sucks. I'm working from home today, and only online thanks to my kind neighbor's dsl.

Big mountains of -ma to all that need it!

In Things That I Can't Believe news:

This bloke is visiting our school to see if we're ready for the Assessment Process that will get us Accredited with some International Schools body or other. He's been before 2 years ago, and apparently when he came then he was demanding people fetch him warm mango, and get fancy coffee delivered from Starbucks, and all this kind of thing - which struck me as pretty spectacularly advantage-taking, but whatever.

Yesterday he came and observed my lesson, and gave me feedback - he said it was Satisfactory on the whole, with several Good features. (Which, obviously, sounds like "crap!", but I know it doesn't actually mean I'm crap. He made some valid and constructive criticisms, and it's always useful to get someone else's perspective on how you can improve things. He said mostly stuff that I'd thought myself about how it went, so that's all okay, and he also made positive comments about various other things about my teaching and my learning environment.) Right.

Today, my respect for his professionalism has sunk somewhat. Apparently he sent someone in the admin staff across town to go and pick up porn DVDs for him.

Which - frankly, I'm still trying to figure out how I can have misconstrued this information. Maybe it was just regular DVDs? Which is still TOTALLY taking the piss, but isn't as spectacularly inappropriate as sending an employee of the primary school you're assessing to go and pick up porn for you.

The guy's name?

...

...

edited because it strikes me that I'm being distinctly indiscreet, and Google is mighty.

Suffice it to say he's called Dick.

Now - Jesus, it's like something out of a Dickens novel. Well, you know - with more Thai porn. But in terms of names and appropriate behaviour - yeah. Gosh.

Apparently he sent someone in the admin staff across town to go and pick up porn DVDs for him.

are you fucking kidding me? I would report him. I would, however, wait until the day his report was due, and say "I don't want this to affect his report, and I don't want you to think that it's in retaliation, so I'm reporting in this window"

Good luck keeping a straight face around Dick Cheat'em, Fay.

Heh. heh. heh. We said Dick.

I get that, but I still don't see how it quite jibes with the "girls attracted to nonthreatening boys" thing.

I'm probably not thinking about this clearly enough, but I'd have said that "nonthreatening boys" = "boys who you reckon (rightly or wrongly) you could take in a fight", as distinct from "boys who look like they could squish you like a bug".

No?

So with the former, there's less of a scary sense of power imbalance for the hypothetical hormonal teenage girl, in terms of her being able to choose how far she takes things?

I may well be talking out of my ass.

Wow, Fay. What an ass.

Also, I sympathize with brenda's plight, because I have not had time to pull out my winter clothes and it's been colder here the past few days, so I've been struggling with the what to wear question. I really need a day when I'm in a less-than-good mood to go through my closets and do a purge.

Just in case anyone needs a kitten fix: [link] vid. that Harvey was just watching avidly.

Reading this from Fay -

I may well be talking out of my ass.

which was followed by Sparky with -

Wow, Fay. What an ass.

just made me laugh and laugh and laugh. But I definitely agree that Dick Cheatham is a royal prick.

I may well be talking out of my ass.

And I may be reading into the whole concept. Its just always felt like such a sexist/homophobic construct to me -- and it rankles that everybody (including people who are neither sexist nor homophobic) just seems to accept it as fact.

Huge amounts of job-ma for Tom. And also dental-ma for Shir.

I need to go for a run today. That 10k isn't going to train for itself. However, don't wanna! I did put together a potential list of triathlons to do for next year though. So somewhat productive.

Fay's school inspector person really lives up to his name! Sheesh.