You Were Such a Shithead When I Taught You
This conversation made my week.
I pull into the filling station.
Me: A fill please. I'm running over to Tim Hortons. Do you want anything? My treat.
(I do this because I HATE filling my gas tank. I don't think I've ever managed to do it without sloshing gas all over my hands and shoes. Then the gas ends up in my mouth because I chew my hands when I'm excited or nervous, which is pretty much all the time, and then I get a little dizzy, not the good dizzy, but the pukey ooh I just ate gas dizzy. If I'm tipping a waiter for bringing me a salad, then I think the pump jockeys should get a coffee for preventing me from ruining another pair of Fly boots and soaking my tongue in fuel...especially when it's -30 degrees and they've got snot-cicles hanging off their face.)
Domo Guy: I don't need anything, but thanks though. (I trot off to get my coffee and come back to clean windows and a full tank.)
Domo Guy: Hey, were you a teacher?
Me: Yeah.
Domo Guy: You taught me, like 7 years ago.
Me: What's your name? You look kind of familiar. (Uh oh. This doesn't bode well as my wine-damaged memory only makes space for the best and worst kids.)
Domo Guy: My name's John. Marsden*.
Me: Oh my god! You were SUCH a shithead in my class! (This kid was responsible for the only fistfight that ever broke out while silent reading.)
John: Yeah, sorry.
Me: Look at you now - you're all polite and normal and grown up! What's going on with you besides Domo?
John: I'm trying to save up $8000 to take a trucking course.
Me: That's so great! Instead of buying you coffee from now on, I'm going to tip you. For trucking school.
John: Yeah, okay. That's nice
Me: See you next time my gas light's flashing.
I think I just found myself a new gas jockey. I vaguely recall that way back when I taught this shit disturber who didn't follow any rules...I kind of respected his anarchist ways.
I drive by Domo the next day to snap a photo of the gas pump for this blog post. As I'm taking the picture John comes running out toward me.
John: Hey, Ms. Salamon, I had an epiphany.
Me: Epiphany. Good word.
John: I was thinking about your class. I was SUCH a dick.
Me: Yeah, we kind of covered that yesterday.
John: But I started thinking about all the stuff I did. I'm really sorry.
Me: It's okay...if memory serves it was an entire class of dicks. It made my month that I ran into you and you've got yourself all sorted out. Let's take a picture for my blog post which is about how you're not a dick anymore . You cool with that?
John: Yeah!
It turns out that John is 2 credits short of graduating high school...one of them is English. Go figure. He needs to get them before he can start rocking out on the highways in his semi.
I'm looking into how to I can help him get the English credit. He, of course, doesn't know this. My plan is to show up with a registration form and some BIG ass books for him to read.
Now who's the asshole? Payback's a bitch.
*I changed a couple of letters in his name for the purposes of privacy.
Update
on 2013-10-02 06:20 by Daria Salamon
There's an update forthcoming on Domo Jon. Stay tuned!