An Elephant Never Forgets: stealing, bad luck or some of both?

With the arrival of 90 degree weather, it seems as if the forecast just suddenly decided to flip on us. It’s as if we cut straight from winter into summer overnight. One day, I’m wearing a scarf to keep me warm while jaywalking across the Pike and then the next, my students and I find beads of sweat forming along the edges of our foreheads and the tips of our noses while taking a trip to the zoo.  And now, it’s pouring rain.

It’s funny how I always feel compelled to blog when I have zillions of other writing assignments to do. I have one final paper left for grad school this semester (I turned in the other one last week), I have three scholarship essays to compose, one letter of recommendation to boot. But in any case, here we are…which brings me to the point of this post: “an elephant never forgets.”

I’ve always been an organized person. My mind is never at rest. I’m constantly thinking about what to do and in what order and why. Needless to say, I rarely lose or misplace anything. However, as you may have inferred from previous posts, reader, I am currently a teacher in an inner-city school. And trust me; there are just way too many things that teachers need to keep in order. It all started last year when I could not find my digital camera for the life of me. Stolen. Slowly, little things would go missing here and there. It was usually food that was taken intentionally and school supplies that were probably taken unintentionally. I had to just let it go and roll with the punches. After all, I figured it sort of came along with the job description. Fine.   But then while on vacation last year, my thumb drive stopped working randomly and I lost a lot of files from my first year of teaching. It was devastating at the time, but then I ended up changing the grade I taught this year (so those files were rendered almost worthless since I’d have to start from scratch. Plus they were from my first year of teaching so haha, let’s be a honest, a lot of the files weren’t all that useful anyway.)

This year, the trend has somewhat continued. I bought an 8 gig USB drive which was stolen only a week or two later. I learned to be a little less naïve and figured out who stole it, but there really was no point in trying to do anything except to hope that they learn the immorality of their actions. Then I lost my cell phone on one of the craziest nights of my life. Fortunately it was time to upgrade to a better phone anyway. I was in love. With the phone. Alas, less than a month later, someone stole my phone and demanded ransom in return.  The words “but it’s gonna cost you” and “so when can you get money, because that’s when we can meet up” will forever leave a bewildering and disappointing taste in my mouth.  Needless to say, I now need to purchase another phone and to top it off, my most recent USB drive also decided to stop working that very week. Who does that?! Who has to replace two phones and three thumb drives?  It’s like the tragedy of technology and theft.

I just had to docuvent my thoughts right now. It’s almost time for the kids to come upstairs and start another day of standardized testing. The good news is that I purchased another thumb drive yesterday.

This time it has a lifetime warranty. Things are looking better with the advent of this summer weather.