Yesterday was a ridiculous day. It started when I opened my little roller bag to get out my teaching materials in a middle school classroom (I teach drug prevention) and I discovered that my individual-sized Mott’s applesauce had opened and about a quarter of the cup had spread itself all over my stuff. It turns out that a little applesauce goes a long way. Naturally, the classroom I was in had no paper towels, so I had to wait until it was time to show my video to make the trek to the teacher’s bathroom to get something to clean it up.

Have you ever tried to actually dry up anything with those crunchy brown paper towels? Not even the soft, folded, tan kind – this was on a roll and could easily have been used to package something to send through the mail. So the paper towels pretty much just pushed the applesauce around rather than wipe it up. My stuff is still sticky.

After I “cleaned up� my mess, I had a long break. Since I am also a freelance writer, I headed to the teacher’s lounge to write before my next class. There was basically one accessible plug in the room and it was several feet from the nearest table. Every week I have taken care to stack my formerly applesauce free bag in front of the cord to keep people from walking through and tripping on it. Yesterday there was even a new little table there, so the space in which the cord was unprotected was about eight to 10 inches wide.

And yet, someone decided to rush right through there. Naturally, she tripped.

It was quite the dramatic fall, in slow motion, with her landing on her bent arms and rolling over. She really did fall hard. I felt horrible – until she started swearing. I was polite, I offered to call for help, and she just kept saying how this was “bulls*%t.� I tried to explain that I had attempted to block off the area, but she just kept swearing. Part of me wished that I would have made her see that she held part of the blame – there was an entire room to walk through and she had to hurry behind me and squeeze her apparently less-than-graceful self through an eight inch space. But, I was a guest in the school and it was my second-to-last day, so I kept my mouth shut. Besides, I’m always so surprised by rude behavior that I can’t think of clever things to say. I know if I had tripped over someone’s computer cord and yanked it out of the wall, I would have been apologizing for my clumsiness and checking to see if the computer was OK. Call me crazy…

I headed home and somehow my brakes locked and I slid into a (thankfully empty) intersection, but otherwise I spent an uneventful hour until I headed off to teach an afternoon class at another school. The classroom I teach in is shared – there is a teacher that uses it the most and then others that have a class there as well. One of those “others� had some concerns about things getting moved around on her desk. She relayed through the teacher that I work with that I am not to sit at or use “her� desk.

First of all, this is hugely insulting. I’m a professional. I have no interest in what is on her desk and no desire to mess with any of it. Second of all, without the desk, there is no where to put my stuff. How am I supposed to teach without a place to set down my notes, or my props and posters? It’s so awkward! I admit that I occasionally used a blank corner of the desk and I sat in the chair away from the desk during videos. It like being a kid in a fancy story trying hard to remember what I shouldn’t touch.

So, on this ridiculous day I set all my stuff on an overhead cart that was not in use. What a nice treat! I set my travel mug of hot tea on the corner of the desk because it didn’t fit on the cart. My throat gets sore from speaking and the tea helps. About halfway through the class, I saw it. My tea was on the evil teacher’s papers!

I do not know how this happened. The glass wasn’t wet, and there was no tea on me. All I could think of was that either a student had bumped it or it leaked when I picked it up to take a sip. I had huge sinking feeling in my stomach. I felt like a kid who had just broken a window with a baseball.

At the end of class I wrote a post-it note apology. I cleaned it up as best as I could. None of the papers were ruined. They were just a little tea-stained; it was like her referrals had birthmarks. I was so flustered that I apparently left half of my lesson there, which was returned to me today. I didn’t even know I left it.

Thankfully, I made it home without further incidents. I woke up today worried about seeing the clumsy, swearing woman and reading a nasty note from the evil desk hog. But the swearing teacher ignored me and the desk hog left no notes. So I was feeling bad about nothing, per usual.

Still, I’d rather not have another day like yesterday.