[HM] Technically, she's right.

This is an original piece of work... due to the content, grammar has to be PERFECT (you'll understand after reading) so I welcome grammar Nazis with open arms. I'd like to make this longer, but I'm trying to keep it under 1750 words.

Now, I don’t know whether you’ve been in the situation where you’ve just about had enough of people and their woefully inadequate understanding of their intellectual shortcomings, but it was in precisely this situation I found myself about a month ago and it led the series of events I will recount to you now.

I sauntered into the office with a debonair resolve as the proverbial excrement had no doubt collided with the fan and I was damned if I was going to go out in anything other than the finest style. You see, I’d had it to the back teeth with this whole circus of an operation they called an educational institution and, I’ll admit, had not been as diplomatic as I perhaps could have been.

I’d started teaching in the golden days; when an educator was respected as being at the top of his or her field. I never intended to stay long, but it was a decent enough pay cheque to support me while I wrote my novel, and teaching English seemed a logical application of my literary skillset. However, as time moved on I let the comfort of a regular income and decent holidays grow upon me like moss on the inactive stone and the emotional drain I hadn’t quite anticipated seemed to suck the creative life from me. Jaded and cynical my wife called me. Well she would say that wouldn’t she? However, upon further consideration she might have been onto something because, whilst I have never suffered fools gladly, I found myself becoming increasingly short tempered with those unfortunate souls for whom the act of employing logical thought was a daily struggle. Especially those who should know better. I allowed some students to make mistakes as they were learning; their intellectual dwarfism was to be expected, but adults were increasingly beginning to earn my ire. Couple this with the school’s new policy of giving passing grades to students who didn’t earn them and I must admit I was about ready to pack the whole thing in.

The young girl behind the front desk smiled weakly at me. She was obviously in a conundrum over whether or not to feel sympathy. Bright and ferociously good at her job, I had always appreciated her competency; though at this moment she resembled an unwilling observer to an autopsy, as she was shifting uncomfortably in her chair, not knowing what to say or where to look.

“Is he in, Suzie?” I enquired, nonchalantly.

The girl shook her head disapprovingly at me, suddenly amused and baffled at my demeanour. She chuckled, once, then simply nodded and mouthed the words “Good luck.”

I sauntered down the hall and knocked twice courteously on the door as I poked my head into the office. The incumbent at the desk was a middle-aged chap who invariably gave the impression he was one step away from collapsing into a nervous wreck. Robert was the principal of our little institute for the educationally depraved and today he appeared more remarkably harried than usual. He possessed the air of someone whom, upon waking, had discovered a rabid Tasmanian Devil in his sock drawer and that this revelation had somewhat set the tone for his entire morning.

“You wished to see me?” I enquired.

He furrowed his brow and responded in the affirmative, whilst doing his best to look stern. I asked after his general well-being, relating the analogy to the Tasmanian Devil I mentioned earlier but he didn’t seem to take this line of enquiry well, so I spared his delicate constitution and dropped the subject.

“What is this?” he snapped at me, shoving a piece of paper across the desk. I recognised the document of course. It was a standard, typed piece of work and covered almost entirely in red, corrective ink. At the bottom of the offending article was a large letter “F” in a circle with the inscription next to it: “This is a grammatical disaster. See me immediately.”

“It appears to be a corrected piece of literature.” I responded with fake curiosity. “A letter writing exercise if I have spied the original correctly, it is hard to tell under all that red marking.”

Robert snatched back the document and roughly held it up to display my signature in red at the bottom. “YOU did this! WHY did you do this?”

I sat down in a chair and reclined at ease, enjoying the obvious frustration of the besieged man before me.

“Well,” I began, “the piece is supposed to be a letter, however the formatting functions more like a magazine article written by a student in kindergarten. The spelling and grammar certainly matches that demographic only, the sentence structure and content reminds me of a communist manifesto promising the beheading of the bourgeoisie at the hands of the beautiful revolution. The past, present and future tenses are used interchangeably and without discretion. Oh, and in the fourth line she used the word “pacific” instead of “specific” which I, for one, believe should be punishable by death. It was overly long, it was confusing and…”

What else it was I wouldn’t be able to tell him for it was at that point he cut me off. “IT WAS WRITTEN BY A PARENT!” he erupted, throwing the page on his desk which collided with what, I imagine, would have been a most unsatisfying light swish sound rather than the large powerful thump that would have perfectly punctuated his point.

I volunteered that the adult age of the composer only made the errors worse, but it appeared he was more concerned with other issues.

“The fallout of this? It’s going to be huge!” he began, infuriatingly choosing to speak only in sentence fragments. “Already contacted head office. District Director furious. Wants to know what kind of school I’m running. She wants you fired! He wants answers and I want to know what possessed you to mark a piece of correspondence and RETURN IT TO THE PARENT???”

I raised my eyebrows in a non-verbal question as to whether he was through with his little tirade and, after he’d sat back down and picked up a mug of pens he’d knocked over, he took a breath and deflated. You see I’d long since come to the realisation that, after the initial bluster and fight, Robert was actually one to avoid confrontation. He simply didn’t have the stamina for it. The “no failing grades” policy of the school was yet another symptom of his confrontational impotence. The new teaching graduates would cower under that initial first assault of his, but those of us who had been around the traps a bit longer had learned to let him have his little fit and wait it out. Myself, I could foresee even keeping my job so long as I first kept my cool and feigned unshakable confidence.

Still, I decided to take pity on the poor man. I could, after all, see his side of things. I’d landed him squarely in it and he was under pressure from all sides. My acknowledgement of how I’d wronged him, if only indirectly, seemed to calm him further and after a moment of quiet reflection, I imagine he was dwelling upon how a rabid Tasmanian Devil would be preferable to his current situation, he spoke quietly;

“From the beginning.”

I recounted the tale of how a boy had handed me his abomination of a final paper for the semester with a deluge of excuses as to its tardiness and not a hope of any one of them being believable. I marked the paper anyway and gave it a passing grade as per the school policy, with a cutting remark at the bottom that left no question as to my thoughts on his literary style, or lack thereof.

Well it was shortly after I returned this insult to creative writing that I received a letter from the invertebrate’s mother insisting that I change his grade. She argued that I was being unduly harsh and that I should be ashamed of my teaching.

“She should proofread her work before criticising mine.” I concluded.

Robert looked at me with a mixture of horror and awe. We had all received letters like this over the years and it was cathartic to spot the errors in the correspondence when the content was questioning your professionalism. He must have, at some level, dreamed of doing what I had done.

“But why antagonise her like that?” he pleaded.

“Well…” I smiled, recollecting, “In the letter she insists, point blank, that I am wrong. I mean, please? That’s akin to a McDonald’s employee criticising the Sous Chef at ‘Le Jules Verne’. One is simply not in the same league as the other.”

Robert was clearly conflicted. He was infuriated by the arrogance and audacity I had displayed and yet he was still smiling in disbelief. But he wasn’t quite ready to let me off the hook.

“So you marked her letter to prove who was right?”

I chuckled.

“No. I marked her letter because she THEN went on to say her son’s English was no worse than hers.”

He stared at me, then grabbed at the letter and stared at it reading furiously. His eyes widened in complete disbelief alternating between me, then the letter, then back again.

“You know…” he smiled cautiously. “Technically she’s right.”

“Yes…” I affirmed, realising my job was safe once more.

“Apparently she is.”