We are all bemused

I have never entered worked with such trepidation since that rather unfortunate (but fortunately brief) affair with a very junior member of the teaching staff last year. But I learned then that the best way to deal with such matters is to brazen it out, and thus I walked in to the office and brazenly took my place.

At 10am Mr Berlosconi (who you may recall is our headteacher) entered my working zone and asked if he could see me in the deputy head’s office (his room being somewhat over run by Latvian dentists, and their pals, the pizza delivery drivers.)

Mr B sat at the desk and I sat opposite trying (without success I fear) to put on a look which said, “why on earth should you want to see little old me?”

“I wish to apologise,” said the head. “Someone has been playing some rather cruel practical jokes on me, and sadly they have seen fit to involve you in the matter. I want you to know that I realise you are not involved in any way.”

People say that sometimes I do have something of a blank expression on my face, and I suppose I had one at that moment. Certainly my mind went blank and my famous book of right brain techniques had nothing to offer. Fortunately, the man himself came to my rescue.

“Someone has written a very silly little piece about me and put it in the staff section of the school’s intranet.”

Wow, I thought. Someone has been tutoring him. As far as I knew the head didn’t even know we had an internet, let alone an intranet.

“I was then given, er, information, that you and one of your colleagues in the office and one of the teachers had been involved.”

(That would be Janice and Havoc Blythe, I thought. Why didn’t he just come out and say that?)

“I have since then discovered this is not the case (oh????) and also discovered someone has stolen my mobile phone, and sent you the most stupid messages. Again I want to assure you it was not me.”

And then he stopped – that was it. No more explanation. Nothing about the Toppled Bollard and falling over outside it. Nothing about the police.

I was stunned. Shocked. Amazed. Quite soon I would probably also be amused and annoyed. Simultaneously.

I certainly had no idea what to make of it, but the meeting was over, and I left.

I make it a rule not to see Havoc Blythe of my own volition – he finds me often enough – but today was an exception, and at lunch Janice, HB and I gathered in the rather dingy coffee shop just around the corner from the school, and debated.

And debated.

Even HB was forced to admit that this was not what he had in mind when he told me to hang on and wait. Quite where the head’s version of events came from, we couldn’t imagine. It was possible that he was not aware that Janice and I had witnessed his drunken performance, and that having found our piece about him on the computer system, and his texts to us, he just made up a story. But, we felt, it was all a bit weak.

We decided to wait for events.

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This entry was posted on 17/06/2008 at 07:25 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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