The Teacher’s Bag

I’m a young office worker. The world is mine. As soon as I’ll fin­ish my cig­a­rette, I’ll go deal with the com­mis­sioner, a weekly task to which I excel. That’s life when you go teach at the government.

“Hi/ bon­jour, what’s your name?”

Great. A spelling bee con­test at 8:55 a.m. I must say that I love my name, but really, does it have to have 4 “i” and sev­eral con­so­nants peo­ple never know in which order to arrange?

I flash my dri­vers’ license, pray­ing that he won’t ask me to take it off its plas­tic cover in my wal­let. Really, it’s not made to be removed – last time I almost broke a nail.

“What are you doing here in Indus­try Canada?”

I’ve been com­ing here every sin­gle Wednes­day morn­ing for the last 6 months. I have a French accent and I’m car­ry­ing a pile of very heavy gray­ish books on which is writ­ten “gram­maire” in big bold let­ters. Don’t you have a clue?

“I’m the French tutor.”
“What are you teaching?”

I’m not going to answer that. But I keep on smil­ing. It’s now 8:57 a.m. and I really badly want my pass.

“Which room are you going to be in?”

Blank stare. I went back to sleep dur­ing the time it took him to answer a cou­ple of per­sonal phone calls. Would I have been fully awake, I would have stared the same. See, Room 719D and Room 731A are quite the same to me. They both have a table, a few chairs arranged around and a black­board on which I’m sup­posed to be writ­ing some con­ju­ga­tion right now. It’s 9:00 a.m.

“Alright, we are going to look up at your student’s name. She did send an email with the room num­ber, didn’t she?”

I have no clue. My stu­dents are aver­ag­ing 50 years old, I can hardly boss them around.

I dread the ques­tion. Here we are.

“What’s your student’s name?”

Why, why, why is my stu­dent Pol­ish? Why, why? Next time, I’ll ask for “Smith” and “John”. Actu­ally, lucky as I am, prob­a­bly not a good idea. There must be 20,000 “Smith” and “John” in the com­puter and it would take ages to go through them all. Gosh. Here we are, spelling again. I soon give up and write down the name on an orange post-it I found in my jacket’s pocket.

“Nope, we don’t have any­body by that name work­ing here, sorry.”

Seri­ously, what do you think? That I’m com­ing here with my imag­i­nary stu­dent just for fun? No, wait. I’m prob­a­bly a spy and I’m going to steal all of Indus­try Canada’s secret plans in rooms 719D or 731A. Get a life, man! I still don’t know to this day what these folks are doing in Indus­try Canada!

He man­ages to find her by 9:05. See, it’s much bet­ter when you look up at “’last name” instead of “first name”.

-“What’s your phone num­ber? Numéro de téléphone ?”

He switched to French. The idea I’m here to teach French to a stu­dent that actu­ally exists made its way through his mind.

“007−1680”

“007−0642?”

“Nope, 007‑1680.”

“Well, with your accent, sounds like 007‑0642. And the area code?”

I give it to him. If he wants my credit card num­ber, he can have it too. Just let me go! Hey man, I know your brother, doesn’t he work at the US border?

“Now, I just need a piece of ID. You’ll get it back when you leave tonight.”

I attempt to get my dri­vers’ license out of its plas­tic cover, but I just don’t have time for this shit and another bro­ken nail. Health card.

“Sorry, we can’t take that.”

“Why not? It has my pic­ture on it!”

“In case you get sick up there and you need it.”

SIN card, no pic­ture. Stu­dent card, expired. Visa card, over my dead body. How many pieces of ID am I sup­posed to carry? YMCA card. It has to work.

“Here is your pass.”

I run to the ele­va­tor down­stairs. See, in Indus­try Canada, ele­va­tors down­stairs stop only at odd num­bers, whereas ele­va­tors on the main floor stop at even num­bers. Of course, half of them are “out of order/ hors de service/ sorry for the inconvenience/ désolés de l’inconvénience”.

I enter the room.

“Sorry, there was a lot of traf­fic this morning…”

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2. A Nation Under Debt
3. How To Bank in Canada (4÷10)
4. Over­time Work And The Over­re­ac­tive Alarm
5. First Steps As A Per­ma­nent Res­i­dent (9÷10)