I hate Ikea.
The furniture is awful, it’s cheap furniture that isn’t cheap and you do all of the hard work yourself but that isn’t my main problem with it. My main problem with Ikea is the way the store is set up. You get trapped in this maze of mediocrity, slowly getting deeper and deeper, further and further in this absolute hell hole and before you know it you are trapped and can’t find a way out. You are confused and lost, you don’t know what you are doing and you just want this hell to end.
The kids went back to “School” this week and I went back to work. Which means the incredibly important task of educating my children falls to a combination of Laura and a 3 inch square video chat window of three teachers they have never met. Truly a perfect solution in imperfect times….. The Ikea of education, the school give you the materials, but you do all the heavy lifting and hard work yourself and it clearly takes two people to do properly but you half ass it with one, mess it up and then spend most of the day swearing.
We had some good news last week that my work authorization was through and we now had legal status to be in the US, moving us up one rung on the legality status ahead of the caravan of people crossing the Rio Grande, but slightly below any of Donald Trump’s wives (ex or current) prior to them marrying him.
This meant that I had a start date for my new job, which was good because I was getting bored sitting around doing nothing, but bad because I was getting paid to do so. The grass really is always greener on the other side for me. 6 months ago if you had said that I could stay home all day, get up when I want and still pay all our bills and do stuff I would have bitten your hand off. After 5 weeks of living that dream I was desperate to get out of the house.
So off I went yesterday, at the ungodly hour of 7am, a time I hadn’t seen since March 13th, all suited up, fresh haircut, I even had a shave. Felt like I had a purpose, spring in my step. Unfortunately my start date coincided with the exact start date of the kids return to virtual learning, which means I got away free and clear from the debacle of 30 7 year olds on a zoom call for 6 hours.
Now a side note here, I pay next to no tax compared to the UK. Like seriously hardly any. In the UK I would lose 50% of my pay check, here 20% tops. A not unrelated point here is that teachers are criminally and I mean criminally underpaid. The school, which is A rated so gets the most money (and really is very good) have to resort to a seemingly never ending fund raising program. The School principal has had to be dunked in water, duct taped to a wall, literally anything to make money. I would seriously not be surprised to hear he is out walking the streets at night pimping out meth heads to keep the lights on.
The school does however manage to find enough money to provide some 20,000 kids with laptops or iPads and on Saturday we picked up two of them. This meant we had to have a chat with Harriet on internet safety, a meandering tightrope walk where she threatened to punch adults who pretend they are kids online and somehow managed to Google pictures of JLo’s ass. She really is a lost cause already, I am resigned to the fact she will have an OnlyFans account in 12 years. If you don’t know what OnlyFans is don’t google it at work please.
So back to the main story. School started at 8.45. I received a text message at 8.43, Harriet had spilled chocolate milk all over herself, the table and Fred’s brand new laptop. This was followed by a text at 8.44 from Fred, who has somehow managed to procure his own phone from somewhere, telling me that “Mum is very angry”
8.50, next text. The system didn’t work, nobody can log in.
The next 4 hours followed a similar pattern. Facetime calls from the kids at random times, texts from Laura telling me that this was shit and she couldn’t do it. Then that the school wasn’t set up for one parent at home and only parents of one child could ever make it work. All while trying to convince the new office I now run that I am a professional, calm leader.
Mid afternoon there was some background chatter on one of the kids call, a parent hadn’t hit the mute button and was shouting at her little darling. Laura was at peak Laura when this happened and shouted something along the lines of “Oh shut the fuck up will you” whilst forgetting that she wasn’t on mute either and 30 10 year olds heard that.
Normally if a person starts a new job, when they get in from that first day there might be few questions asked about the day, how it went, what the people were like etc. Not this time though and quite rightly so. It was all about a debrief on the school day.
Somehow there were still things to discuss despite how much contact we had had during the day and I listened intently and a little concerned about how it was going to pan out. That was until Fred blurted out he had seen a naked man today.
A very odd and slightly troubling thing for a 10 year old boy to say and something I pounced on immediately. Before I could question my son on this though a somewhat exhausted Laura jumped in to give me the full story.
Midway through the day just as it was settling down and everyone’s little attentive faces were listening to their talking head teachers a shadowy figure appeared behind one of the kids. He wandered to the fridge, opened it up and grabbed a cold beer. All very normal, even if it was 2pm. The only problem was he was stark. bollock. naked. Laura explained that she didn’t think he was totally naked, but Fred was adamant. In an usual use of the anatomically correct word rather than the adult slang he let me know in no uncertain terms that he “saw the man’s penis”. I wouldn’t mind but it wasn’t even on his lesson.
So despite all the warnings and teaching the kids about internet safety, all of the filters and education, all the make sure you are safe online, my 10 year old boy thought he saw an adult mans cock at school on Monday.
He definitely didn’t though. Laura had seen it all and it was just a guy in shorts, grabbing a beer. I was obviously very relieved by this but Fred has inherited one of my least pleasant but most fun traits. He never, ever lets the truth get in the way of a good story.
The Shroders in Florida 