Month: August 2017

As teachers, we’ve been asked to take pictures of our students so we can upload them to the online seminary site. Parents can use the site to check their kids’ attendance and such, and I assume my “boss” and other church leaders have visibility into each class so they can make sure things are running smoothly.

This morning informed the kids I’d be taking their photos at the end of class. There was a lot of groaning, and a couple of the girls complained that they just didn’t look their best at 6am. Never fear, I replied: I had a bunch of costume wigs (mostly from my old Halloween costumes). The results were hilariously satisfying:

I’m wondering how long it will be before a parent or church leader contacts me about what the heck I’m doing in my class…

The only time “incorrectly” isn’t spelled incorrectly is when it’s spelled “incorrectly”.

Well, tomorrow is the first official day of seminary. This will be my third year teaching, and I’m excited about a new class and an opportunity to spend my (early!) mornings with 18 awesome high schoolers.

My classroom is ready.

I’m not sure I’m ready, but as always, I’ll take it a day at a time. I usually prepare my lessons the night before, and in fact I’ve found that preparing a few days in advance doesn’t help because the material isn’t as “fresh”. My brain isn’t running at full power at six in the morning!

Some realtor/sales guy just called and said he has a buyer who’s interested in purchasing a home in my neighborhood. He asked how long I’d been living in my house, and whether I’d be interested in selling it to this buyer.

It makes me wonder how often this little sales technique is successful. Does he really expect people to say, “Gosh, I’ve been living here for 15 years and didn’t have any plans to move, until you called and convinced me to make a major life decision right now. Let’s do this!”

I was out all this week on Trek, with no phone service whatsoever. When I returned to civilization, I had nine voicemail messages from different people at Equifax. In every message, they were asking me to provide a fax number so they could send me a form to use to verify employment for one of my guys.

Fax? Really? Equifax is one of the “big three” credit reporting agencies, and since personal credit is such a sensitive thing– witness millions of consumers who have to go through a herculean process to “fix” their credit after identity theft– I’d expect that they’d use a little more caution handling that data. Faxes are horribly insecure, of course, but not only that, it’s the Twenty-first Century now. We have this nifty thing called the “internet”. Can’t they use a secure web form instead? Sheesh.

Now that I’m back in the office, I expect it’ll only be a matter of time (probably an hour or two) before they call a tenth time to ask me for my fax number. That’ll be a fun conversation!