Miss Information has a failure to communicate
Miss Information is assigned to the children's department today. She is wearing the shoes with the little skull and crossbones motif. Anyway, it is blessedly a break between those “we entertain your children so you don’t have to” story sessions so Miss Information doesn't have to listen to happy morning songs or look at shiny happy faces. In fact, the department is relatively quiet….except for that buzzing.At first, Miss Information assumed the faint buzzing sound was coming from inside her head and so tried to silence it with more and stronger coffee, but it soon became clear that others could hear it too. Not a good sign. There were a couple of reasons an alarm might be going off, both non-fatal but one of them is kind of icky. In order to investigate, Miss Information headed for the little alcove next to the program room where the ESL class was meeting. Unfortunately she had waited too long and the ESL class, believing that there was a fire, had decided to evacuate. Miss Information couldn’t get to the little alcove because dozens of ESL students were now in her way. She tried to get them to go back to their room. She said reassuring things like “it’s not a problem, go back to class” and “everything’s fine, go back to your room” and “it’s probably just the sump pump alarm” and “get the hell out of the way!” See because Miss Information is pretty stupid in the morning she’d forgotten a very important factor—these people are ESL students because they don’t already speak English. So basically, Miss Information’s reassurances were lost on them. They wanted to know what was going on and Miss Information’s 4 years of high school Latin aren’t much help in these situations.
She finally located the person who she thought was their teacher, urging her to get the students back in the room so Miss Information could find out what was causing the alarm. The woman stared at her blankly. Um…ok, either she isn’t the teacher or her grasp of English isn’t much good either or more likely, the instruction to return to a small enclosed space while an alarm goes off didn’t sound like good advice to her.
Eventually Miss Information managed to shoulder her way through the mob. As she expected it was the sump pump malfunctioning.
If there really was a fire, though, all those ESL students would have been briquettes because they only managed to evacuate about 4 feet. They might need a special class on fire safety.
3 Comments:
I was wearing skull and crossbones shoes at the library today, too! And my co-worker had on a skull and crossbones tie. It must have been that kind of day.
The Reader has not responded to Miss Information's posts in several months, but he wishes to assure her that he has read every one.
The Reader has been quite ill. Still is, as a matter of fact, but has serious hope that recovery is just around the corner.
Miss Information sends positive thoughts (don't laugh, she has a couple) in The Reader's direction.
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