This week we get right to the questions. We can barely contain ourselves.
Dear Mordechai,
The kids are back in school! Now I’m finally free to… Wait. What did I used to do with my days?
Mommy
Dear Mommy,
Nobody knows. Maybe someone should’ve written it down.
I have the same problem after Pesach. I spend months doing nothing but cleaning, and then after Pesach I’m like, “Wait. What did I used to do with my spare time? Should I just start cleaning again?”
Maybe now that your kids are back in school, you should start cleaning for Pesach.
But don’t worry; your days will fill up pretty quickly. You’ll get called in to meetings with the school, someone will be sick every other day because the school is basically a big petri dish where they stick a bunch of kids in a tiny room with no ventilation and make them share a bathroom pass, and sometimes, for no reason at all, the school will give a vacation day. What the heck is a “teacher in-service”? It sounds like they’re davening together.
You also need to spend a lot of time going shopping, because your son’s afternoon teacher keeps telling you to send more snacks because he never has snack come afternoon. But the truth is that no matter how many snacks you give him he won’t have any snacks come afternoon. He eats most of them on the bus on the way to school.
And of course your evenings will disappear. Evenings are for doing homework with the kids and teaching them the material so the teachers don’t know that they’re falling behind, because if they do, you’ll start getting called in for meetings during the day for things you already know about (“What are you doing at this meeting? Shouldn’t you be teaching my kid?”) even though you suspect that every kid in this class is behind, and the teacher has no idea because everyone’s parents are doing the homework.
Anyway, I don’t really sympathize with you, because I’m a teacher. I stumble around the house in the mornings, but then in the afternoons I have to deal with more teenage boys than my wife and I would ever consider having voluntarily. And I teach in a mesivta that has night seder every night, so I can’t even assign homework. And then I come home and do homework with my kids, whose teachers are allowed to assign homework. That’s pretty fair.
Dear Mordechai,
What’s the best line to pick at the grocery?
Too Many Choices
Dear Too,
Whichever line I’m not on.
I’m not trying to be selfish. I pick the slowest one. I always get in line behind the store manager with the cart full of merchandise that he’s trying to program into the register.
And everyone tries to pick the shortest line. Even the people who aren’t in a rush. No one’s using any other factor to choose a line. But the cashier has no incentive to work quickly. He gets paid by the hour. If he rings people up quicker, customers will keep picking his register, and he’ll have more work to do. Why would he want to ring up more customers? He doesn’t get commission. So yes – every time he has a question, he’s going to wait for the manager, like he’s never had a question before.
It’s also simple math. If there are ten checkouts, you have a 1 in 10 chance of being on the fastest line. That’s horrible odds. And even if you’re talking about just your line and the two right next to you, that’s 1 in 3.