We've all had at least one person in our professional lives who has seriously rubbed us the wrong way. I said seriously, not literally. Unfortunately, some of us have endured the latter, and that's a crime (literally), but I'm talking about the person who, in a sitcom scenario, would cause the other characters to break the 4th wall and raise their eyebrows at the camera as if to ask, "Are you fucking kidding me?" Everybody has their Dwight Schrute, their Bill Lumbergh, their Tom Haverford. Some antagonize you with malice, some are complete boors, some mean well but have no concept of boundaries. Some are a mix of the worst aspects of all three.
My Dwight, bless his idiot heart, was fortunately not a coworker, per se, but someone I had the obligation to encounter for two hours one afternoon each week throughout most of the school year. My Dwight was an older gentleman who brought his therapy dog every week for kids to practice reading aloud to a non-judgmental ear. And I grew to dread his presence. So I'm an ungrateful, intolerant monster with a heart coated in a lethal sheen of black ice, right?
Do read on.
This guy reaches out to me by email in August, offering this therapy dog reading program I had been wanting to arrange through a different organization. This guy is local and available, he's worked with other schools in the area, and he's fully insured. What could go wrong?
He shows up for his first visit and unloads a mountain of religious paraphernalia onto the table, asking if I will give it out to the kids. Before I can protest, "But sir, this is a public school," he barks, "Now that our guy's in Washington and Betsey's running the Department of Ed, things are a lot different. We don't have to hide anymore."
In hindsight, I should have shown him the door immediately. Oddly enough, one of his quirks turned out to be never remembering how to get back to the main office to exit the building, even after 6 months of weekly visits, and despite the fact that the main office is attached to the library.
At any rate, I gritted my teeth, changed the subject, and threw out all that churchy crap as soon as he left that day. (Actually that's a lie, I swept it into the back of a drawer, but I'm gonna throw it out when I clean at the end of the year, okay?). After all, the kids were excited about the dog, and that's what it was all about, right?
As time went on, it became clear this guy hadn't spent a lot of time around elementary-aged kids. He had approximately zero patience, and if a kid stumbled over a word he'd sigh and order them to "just skip it" like he was getting an oil change and the Jiffy Lube guy was trying to upsell him on a bunch of unnecessary air filters. He'd play on his phone with the sound fully on, keyboard clicks and all, while kids were reading. He'd openly roll his eyes, yawn, and sometimes fall asleep while kids were reading to his dog. I get it, dude, they're not exactly landing an Audible contract anytime soon with their oratory skills, but the whole point of this is to build their confidence, and you blatantly giving no fucks is not helping!
He'd hold loud conversations about mass shootings and violent tragedies involving children, within earshot of actual children.
He bragged to a class of 2nd graders about taking three tries to pass 2nd grade. I cringed but assumed he was joking. Somehow or other it later came up that he and my mom are the same age. "Oh, so you graduated in '74?" "Nah, '76, I got held back a coupla times."
Oh. My. God.
Not that you have to be a rocket scientist to be a good person (in fact, my very good friend Danielle is a literal rocket scientist and she's a turbo-asshole*). He's giving up his free time to do this nice thing that the kids seem to love! His heart is probably in the right place? But maybe let's not flippantly announce that kind of thing to children as if it's a funny joke of no consequence?
He was a little too interested in students' intellectual abilities, which were, of course, none of his business at all. "Is that child special needs?" he'd ask, the way a minimally trained parrot demands to know if Polly wants a cracker.
"No sir, that child is a child. Whether or not they have any special needs is not something I can disclose to you." (And also, most of the time, it is blatantly obvious. Do you ask someone who uses a wheelchair if they really can't walk, or do you just use your powers of observation and your grown-up-person sense of tact to not ask that question in the first place because it is both none of your business and not necessary to ask in the first place?)
The day that really put me over the edge, he managed to ask me a series of highly intrusive, personal questions that were virtually apropos of nothing. I don't know if it's standard for professional acquaintances to exchange data sheets with pertinent personal and financial information, but he clearly was expecting that TPS report and I failed to deliver. He asked me how much Andy and I recently spent on airfare for a trip this summer (Nunya. Nunya business and also it's called the internet, look it up if you really must know). He inquired about how much Andy and I spent on our wedding and whether our parents paid for it. And by the way, are my parents dead? Are Andy's parents dead? This, mind you, was at least the third time this year I've had to remind him that my dad is, in fact, still quite dead.
As if that wasn't all delightful enough, the straw that broke the camel's back (and put the camel in a wheelchair, causing my special friend to ask the camel whether it really couldn't walk) was a question he asked about a student, that said so much about this guy's mindset, with so few words.
A black girl in 1st grade came in and confidently whizzed through a book. She read with expression and didn't miss a single word. As she was skipping towards the door, the guy nods like he's really impressed, turns to me and stage whispers in a conspiratorial tone, "Do you know where she's from, you know, originally?" You know the tone. The tone someone uses to ask, "Did any hamster fur show up in the colonoscopy?" or "Do you wanna do some blow before we take our kids to see Paw Patrol On Ice?" The tone you use when you're pretty sure you're asking about something shameful but you ask anyway.
All I said in response was, "Here??" But I totally also made that eyes wide open bitch face that was meant to communicate, "Duh, asshole." I should have called him out for the layers of insidious racism implied by his question and the way in which he asked it, but in the moment, I wasn't prepared to unpack all that. If I had said something like, "I will extrapolate from your tone that you are only asking that because she's a person of color who is excelling at an academic metric, and you assume that the only explanation is that she is a recently-arrived immigrant because black people from families with a longer history in this country couldn't possible exceed your low expectations like that, but also you kind of think the answer to your question is somehow dirty or shameful," he would have looked at me like I had five heads. Someone who has to say "3rd time's the charm" about passing 2nd grade isn't really here for breaking apart their deeply held and likely unconscious assumptions about race in America. (And also, I'm not a dummy, he would of course feel attacked, and even if I stand by all of those words and think racism deserves to be met with scorn and derision, I know that isn't the most effective way to start a dialogue that would encourage someone to actually reconsider their assumptions or beliefs.)
I came to so dread the weekly visits from this bumbling goober who generously volunteered his time to bring his therapy dog to visit my students every week. I put up with his eccentricities for the good of the children. But this was too much. I was mad as hell and I wasn't going to take it anymore. So I did what any empowered woman who is determined to reclaim her time and space from the mountain of patriarchal horse shit she's had to tiptoe around on the multi-use nature trail of life would do.
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