Argh

Have I mentioned how much I hate my job currently?
(I think I have)

So today I get in my mailbox, just as I'm leaving, a three page schedule for a "Katrina Spiritual Retreat Workshop on Stress" we're all mandated to attend.

Tonight.
Mandated.

Now, we'd heard a vague threat that we'd have to attend something like this from the principal (spurred on by our overly eager religion teacher, who found this idiotic thing in the first place), and like the naive sheep they are, the administration jumped on it.

I think what I hate most about this job...well, one of the things....is how the administration views us, the faculty. We are viewed and treated essentially as children. That's the way we are spoken to most of the time, as naughty children...it's a constant stream of patronizing, petty criticism.

The administration is staffed by elemetary school nuns, and that's how they roll.

(To wit, this is pretty bad teaching methodology by the way, but then they've never been much concerned with teaching anyway)

Aaaaaaaaanyway, back to the story:
So, after 9 hours of being on my feet (literally), teaching 150 odd rowdy teenagers all day, I get this note in my box, *finally* giving us some information about this rumored "workshop"
(This, by the way, is the top two "thing I hate most about my job," the administration's utter lack of planning ahead for *anything*)

The workshop started tonight at 6 pm.

Ummm...we got the information at 4 pm today.

We were to check into the hotel downtown by 5 pm. Dinner was at 6 (0h, by the way, "please bring 20 dollars (cash) for dinner," the paper specifies)...
then workshop one begins until 9 pm (on a Thursday frickin night.)
I've been awake since 5:30 this morning.

Tomorrow's interary is more grueling and inane still. It will be, as all such things I've ever been to (and I've been to a lot) a complete and utter waste of time.

We're expected to be there at 8 am tomorrow morning(on Canal Street) for a mass. Then we'll be there all day again, having our blood pressure checked (?) and listening to droning automatons talk about "stress" presumably.
Who knows. It will be painfully boring I know.

(Oh, bring 10 more dollars "for the t-shirt", the 3 page handout says)
At 9 pm we may leave, and then prepare to return for Saturday's events.

Added to this, my mother, who is particularly needy right now and had already plead with me to stay with her this weekend, is giving me grief now too. She is not happy.
Neither am I.

The principal (a nun, needless to say) must have heard some distant echoes of grumbling I presume...even secluded as she is in her ivory cacoon....
So, being the effective administrator that she is, she's told us point blank,
"If you don't feel like coming, you can report to school to pick up trash."

In other words you'd better be there tomorrow morning at mass or look out. Hell hath no fury like a nun that's been scorned.

So, I've figured it out, between the money I have to spend on parking down there and food, I'll be out close to 75 dollars. I'll be spending the whole weekend with people I hate, and for what? Because some nitwit of a religion teacher got it in his head that we needed some relief from "Katrina stressa>."