So, mom gets pressured into doing a show-and-tell to five classes at the elementary school, and, lacking the accoutrements to display her Nobel Prize-winning lab work in baked chicken and asparagus, brings along a dead bat to show the kids a bit about biology.
Wouldn’t you know it: The bat was dead for a reason. Rabies. So, the school system in Stevensville, Mont., is spending $150,000 for all the kids to be vaccinated.
Beware when the school bell tolls. It tolls for thee. At some point, your little munchkin will come home with a request for you to come to school and tell the kids what you do for a living, or to show off your collection of pornographic cufflinks.
Many years ago, I took steps to assure such a thing would never happen to me. I sent the kids off shopping at downtown Hartford’s exciting Front Street redevelopment site, and have never seen them since. But it didn’t work.
In the distant past, the West Hartford school snared a federal grant thing to trick professionals into coming to the elementary schools and inspiring the kids to grow up, work hard and become investment bankers at Lehman Brothers. I was chosen. I told them I had rabies, but even that didn’t work.
Left-Wing Conspiracy
It was a nightmare. I didn’t even have a dead bat to fend them off. These kids acted as if they worked for the vast left-wing conspiracy at NPR or CNN, and I was Sarah Palin.
Here are these young kids, barely old enough to snort cocaine or absorb a really valuable condom lesson from the health class, and what’s the first question out of their mouths? “How much money do you make?”
I haven’t always been a successful, powerful, well-compensated columnist for the Hartford Business Journal. That was an embarrassing question. I asked them if they knew what “million” meant. That shut them up.
My advice to you, when your day comes, is to at all cost avoid irony. The kids are much like regional vice presidents and CEOs: They don’t get irony.
When they asked me why I “became” a writer (as if I passed up a chance to be a newspaper publisher or something easy like that), I told them I chose writing because I wasn’t very good at math; that addition and subtraction aren’t bad, but long division had me stumped. For those CFOs reading this column, that was IRONY.
So, of course, one of the little snots writes me a “thank-you note” the next day, offering to show me how to do division because it really isn’t that hard.
Most of the students to whom you speak at such things will be directed to write you notes, telling you how interesting and provocative and smart you are — the kind of notes that the Hartford Business Journal gets about me.
One student explained that he told his mom all about me, “and she would like to meet you.” Yikes.
Advice On Strippers
A few months ago, somewhere out West, a guy who was tricked into participating in a school “career day” offered advice to the girls on how to be strippers. This was stretching the envelope a bit as a curriculum enhancement, but it did guarantee that he would never be invited back. Keep that in mind when your day comes.
And when the kids get hostile, tell them you’ve securitized their grades and bundled them in such a way that their parents will never actually know about that “C” in deportment. If “financial services” isn’t enough to get you banned from career day, tell them you’re a coffin salesman. Tell them anything. Get out with your dignity.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
