Operation Slip Eater

As I have stated before, I was allotted a handful of electives during my tenure at New Braunfels Middle School, the Olympia of public education. Though the selection wasn’t the most expansive, there was some choice besides the physical education classes. The school included: art, theater, computer science, choir, journalism, computer programming, library science, the list went on for a yard. Being the sedentary child that I was, I never wanted to do something that required a lot of mental thought, nor physical activities, as rolling around the mat in the locker room really took it out of me. So, instead of doing something that might hone my skills, or give me any time of practical or creative skill, I chose to be an office aid.

Essentially I was a gofer, I would walk around the school handing out informational slips, and memos to various classes throughout the school. Besides occasionally letting teachers know to tell one of their students that their dear aunt Ronda had been smashed by an Amtrak, I would also collect attendance slips. My supervisor Ms. Slaughter was the person in charge of keeping track which students would show up to school, and which ones would be liquidated.

So, at some point during my daily hour spent in the front office I would get up and retrieve half of the school’s attendance slips, usually clipped to the outside of the classroom door. Though occasionally the instructor would forget, so I would knock on the door, walk in and ask for them to conduct a headcount, and hand me that foot long piece of green paper. Though there was one teacher, who later became my journalism teacher, who would never remember to do the attendance, like ineffective clockwork he was. Despite the fact that I went all around the school, kicking in doors to tell people to give me the slips, I was able to do it to Mr. Brooks, because there was a particular girl in his class.

Being the unfit, socially awkward kid that I was, I had become infatuated with this girl Danielle the previous year in sixth grade, and she had chosen journalism as one of her electives. So, I would see her through the window, and was unable to enter the room and be blasted by her pheromones which lingered in the air. While the class was happening, a extremely meek knock came at the door, and my chunky face appeared behind the chicken wire lined window.

Besides going on out to deliver and pick up notes across campus, I spent a lot of time just sitting around the front office with nothing to do but stare at the walls. There was another office aid whom I will call Gregory as I don’t recall his real name, so I would talk to him about Dragon Ball Z, and looked at the covers of my Deltora Quest books as I would read them. One of the more odd memories I had of me and Gregory was the fact that we both knew that located in the office, there was a security camera that would record our every move, granted it was when we were sitting at the round table within the office. Then one day the camera was gone, and we pointed it out to the lady who worked the front desk. She completely denied the existence of it ever being there, maybe the government would off her if she exposed their plan to control children by way of permanent records and stale coffee.