4-5-00 The Worm

 4-5-00 W 1:30 PM

[sketch in blue ink of Blake's "I have said to the Worm: Thou art my mother & my sister."] Ugh.  Where do I start?  Monique Skullee didn't turn in her tests to me, and I didn't make sure that she did.  Her tests disappeared.  She says she left them stacked next to the trashcan and the custodian must have thrown them in the trash.  I would have just sent in the rest of the tests and no one would have noticed, but she went to Principal Harvard and told her the tests were gone.  When I signed in yesterday morning, a note waited for me from Harvard.  "See me" it read.  The "me" was underlined twice.  She wanted to know what happened.  "Skullee's tests are gone."  What else was I supposed to say?

"Didn't you have them locked up?"

"No. She didn't give them to me."

"Didn't she sign the affidavit?"

"No. I didn't give it to her."

Silence. Then, "You need to call downtown and see what they want you to do."

Great.  They patch me through to the colonel in charge of the whole program, Janet Vane.  She grills me unmercifully.  "How could this happen?"  She seems to want a step-by-step reenactment of the crime, like I was there. She wants everything repeated.  She wants names.  She's writing everything down.  Harvard talks about how a teacher in Long Beach lost his credential for violating the integrity of the test.  Whatever.  Fire me. I spend the day on the phone and running around getting signatures on the security affidavits.  Skullee won't sign hers in case she wants to pretend she didn't know they were supposed to be turned in and secured and not stacked next to the trashcan.  Put the blame on me.  Meanwhile, I discovered that the scoring sheets were supposed to be bubbled in with the scorer's room number, and not the test-taker's, which makes no sense, so now I have to erase the numbers I had assigned and bubble in new ones for several hundred tests.  Ugh.  No newspaper, no journal, no reading yesterday.  Then we had a staff meeting.  Surprise!  I'm on the agenda.   Blah blah blah.  All bullshit.  I didn't get home until after four.  Florelle came talking what a dumb bitch Skullee is.  Rochelle had tacos waiting. I ate two and drank a 7Up and watched the Dodgers beat the Expos.  Florelle dropped me at Pio Pico to teach my night school class.  

After class, Rochelle and I went to Borders and bought travel books for Australia, Ireland, and Spain to try to decide where to fly with the vouchers my sister gave us from United.  We got a BB King CD and a copy of "The Phantom Menace" on video.  I read the "Sunset Boulevard" screenplay excerpt.