No good deed goes unpunished.

Last Thursday I went and volunteered for Diana's class. This year she is in third grade and come to find out all the third grade teachers make their lesson plans together. There are six teachers all together and I guess each of them takes a turn for two weeks. So what this means to me is that I am not just copying for Diana's teacher, I am making copies for six classes. That is 6 sets of 20 of each copy. The first week of school, it took me 2 and a half hours to make about 1800 copies. I did not hole punch any of them that week. The next week it took me 3 hours to make about 2400 copies and I did hole punch the ones that needed that done to them. I kept thinking that there has to be a better way. The girls in the front office told me that I should be making all those copies on the rizzo (sp?) machine instead of the copy machine. So that brings us to last Thursday. I arrived at the school determined to cut my time and be more efficient.


I went and signed in at the office. This apparently is not optional. At my old school I never once signed in during the 7 years that my boys attended. Perhaps they had so few parent volunteers that they were just glad I was there to help and they choose not to harass me as payment for my services. Well when Diana started at this new school 2 years ago, I was introduced to RULES for parent volunteering. We have a principal that we lovingly refer to as Hitler. She has very many rules for everything. Basically you are not allowed to do anything at her school. So anyway they are very insistent that you sign in and obtain a visitor badge. I am sure that this is all great and better for security, but I find it to be a pain when I am there all the time and they know me. So once I had my badge I went to make all my copies. It actually did go faster this time and I was thrilled when I was completely finished in just under two hours. I went to the office to turn in my badge. Imagine my surprise when in the slot where my driver's license should be, I find badge #3 and not my driver's license. I have badge #36. There is still a driver's license in the slot for badge #3. So it is not hard to figure out that the person who had badge #3 had mistakenly taken my license when she left. Shockingly enough, I was not impressed with the idea of some other person running around with my license. I complain to the office staff and each one replies that they did not take any badges from anyone. Finally we figure out that the lady who took my badge has had a stroke and is not quite all together there and that she likes to just help herself by putting her badge back. Once I learn this, I calm down a little bit, but I am still not impressed. I went home and received a call a short time later telling me that they tracked the culprit down and that my license would be in the office the next morning.

Two years ago, I accidentally left my license in the office and took home my visitors badge. Unfortunately, this was the Friday before Christmas break so I had to live without my license for two weeks. This only proved to be inconvenient when I went to Comp USA on Christmas Eve to buy a new computer. If I had my ID I could have applied for an interest free credit card to put my purchase on, but instead I had to just pay with cash. I guess that was good to have less debt. Anyway after that I vowed to never let the office have my license again. Instead I would give them my car keys, figuring that it would be pretty hard to forget to get them. Hopefully I would not just walk home and leave my car there, right? But then last year, the office cracked down and they said it was no longer acceptable to leave keys, it had to be the ID. I then made a photocopy to leave each week when I volunteered. This worked well all year last year, but somehow I lost that copy of my ID during my many travels during the summer months. So this year I haven't managed to copy it again. Funny that in the 3 million copies I have made in the past three weeks, I have not managed to make just one copy of my license. Well be assured I will make a copy for tomorrow, because I will not let these people ever have my license again.
And yes, I did get it back the next morning so I guess it wasn't really all that awful, but cheese louise I wish it didn't happen in the first place.