Get 'em off!

I once responded in a thread on someone else's blog about germs and such with a verse from a classic "Weird Al" Yankovic song :

"They're all over me...
they're inside of me...
can't get 'em offa me...
I'm crawling with....microscopic bacteria!"

I feel this is the case with me today.

I know I often blog about funny things that happen at school, and I like to relate how my students are progressing. I keep things fairly low-key because I have no wish to be dooced. Many of you have the same feeling. Sometimes, I post things about school with trepidation, simply because while I love what I do and most of the people I work with, there are exceptions to every rule, and nothing is perfect, everywhere.

In class yesterday, we had an amusing, yet alarming, happening.

The maintenance workers were out and about, cleaning out all of the air conditioner filters. We use our A/Cs rigorously here in the summer, otherwise, we would spontaneously burst into flames. Over the course of a year, the filters get all gunked up with all sorts of crud. Once they had completed washing out of the filters, they replaced said washed filters in the units and moved on to the next class.

After a minute or two, my A/C kicks on, and huge froths of bubbles start blowing across this room. This was the amusing part. At least, it was amusing for the children, who immediately acted like God gave them no sense at all, and strted standing on chairs in order to pop the bubbles. I was less amused.

The horriffic part was that my desk is *directly under* the main A/C vent, and bubbles were spewing ALL over my desk and everything on it. I quick ran to shut off the air, leaving our room about the approximate temperature as your average sauna, and tried to bravely soldier on. My whole desk was sopping wet. My chair was wet. All my sticky notes were ruined piles of goo. I *cannot* function without sticky notes!

We could not leave the air off any longer, as we were beginning to all get heat rash, so I had to end up covering my desk with a layer of trash bags. My desk had standing puddles of water on it. I used an entire roll of paper towels trying to clean the mess up.

You would think that would be bad enough, right? No! Of course not! I, trying to be a "good teacher" cleaned the vent, hoping to stop, or at least STALL, the flow of bubbles down my classroom wall. The towels came away *black* from all the mold in the vent. The next time the vent kicked on, I got bubbles *and* mold bits in my hair.

Is it any wonder that my throat is now sore?