I get a call this morning from my Crossing Guard dispatcher telling me I need to go to a different corner this morning. The cross streets are familiar to me, so I figure no problem. I give myself 20 minutes to get there.
Turns out I went to the wrong Cunningham street :mad:
Turns out the Cunningham street I need to be at is across town :mad:
Turns out I get there 5 minutes before my shift is up and no witnesses to prove I was actually there :mad:
So what this morning amounted to was about 1 hour of frantically tearassing through San Jose looking for the damn street I have to be at so I can cross the kids. Fortunately there is a traffic light there (they have guards cross kids as an extra precaution). I went home afterward rather than going straight to school (don’t have class for a few hours) because I need to sit down, take a whole lot of deep breaths, and imagine Im in my happy place…
I don’t know much about how crossing guards are dispatched, but it seems to me if there is more than one street of the same name, the people who tell you where they need you should be aware of this, and be specific about which one they want you to go to. Clearly this isn’t your fault. Hopefully they’ll at least have the intelligence to realize this.
The shifts are extremely short- its likes 45 minutes to an hour, with one shift in the morning and another in the afternoon. So if I have trouble finding the corner I need to be at, I am technically really late.
I have this deep-seated paranoia that if I can’t find the corner I’m supposed to be at on time, some student will get hit by a car as a result of my absense :eek: There was a situation a year ago in which a student was hit after the guard that was supposed to be there left 5 minutes early.
This month marks the 1-year point at this job, and this job is the longest job I’ve ever held, so I take it extremely seriously. Normally, its not quite this stressfull since my ‘regular’ location is only 5 minutes from my house.
Must be contagious. I thought spring break was this week and didn’t prepare for my class. At least I remembered at the last minute that I do, in fact, have to go to class today. :dubious:
I had a dream that I was working my crossing guard shift and a car caught on fire. I found a fire extinguisher and tried to put out the fire, but the people died horribly inside. Suddenly, Christopher Walken walks up to me and says quietly, “I’m…so very disappointed in you” :eek: in which I panicked and hit him in the head with the fire extinguisher than ran off screaming like a little girl.
See, I also work as a tutor for a tutoring center. I work this job in the evenings during the week. This evening, my boss has a talk with me because apparently yesterday I had hurt a kid’s feelings when I told him to pay attention (he kept looking at some kids running around) well that kid cried to his mommy about big mean ME and the mom had a talk with my boss and suffice to say she wasn’t happy which means my boss isn’t happy.
Although I saw THAT coming a mile away- there is no possible way I could get through that job without some kid whining about me doing my job and me getting yelled at about it at least once.
happens to me. Accidentally set the alarm for PM instead of AM. Oversleep in the morning, then when I’m settling down to take a little nap 12 hours later, get the crap startled out of me by the alarm blaring :mad:
What in the purple hell is up with San Jose’s streets? Leaving the Arena on Santa Clara, you with encounter an intersection with “Almaden” no less than three times!
Consecutively!
And one of those has the Greyhound station, which hopefully your girlfriend will be able to find, despite not knowing the area all that well, and likely not being prepared for three identically-named intersections in a row.
I say “intersections” instead of “streets” because two of the Almadens merge into one boulevard right off Santa Clara, like so
| <- Santa Clara (vertical line)
|
|===== Almaden 3
|
|\ <-Almaden 2
| ================ <-result of two Almadens
|/ <-Almaden 1
Maybe I shoukd go ahead and draw some ASCII cows and cars and stuff oion there…
Life gets way simpler when you leave college and get a full-time job … then you say “oh dear god, do I have to be at Job#1 - only one… one that is sucking the life blood from me?” :rolleyes: lol oh life is wunnerful ya know lol…
Thats bullshit - you’re there to tutor the kid not be his Mom… and she should be bloody glad that you were doing your job - she should have yelled at the kid for not paying attention in the first place … sheeshhhhhhhh…
I’ll just bet she’s one of those Mom’s who won’t send her kid out in the rain, cos, ya know, he’s a sugarlump and might melt
Troy McLure, you may think San Jose’s streets are bad, but I find Downtown Palo Alto and Santa Cruz worse. Both have long narrow streets that are impossible to make U-turns (so if you are going the wrong way you’ll be doing it for some distance short of getting lost) and FIVE WAY INTERSECTIONS! What kind of sadistic engineer thought of that? I want to make a right turn, but there’s sharp right, and not-so-sharp right, and no signs to indicate what street is what! and the guy behind me has been honking since the light turned green :mad:
