Here’s your Sign.

I work in a school. Long time readers will doubtless find that amazingly obvious, but please bear with me and I promise to get to the point shortly. Schools are places of (allegedly) learning. If schools can be said to have an over-arching purpose, it might be to educate our youth for the purpose of curing them of ignorance to the extent that is currently possible.

I have been working on a corollary to this idea, which states that as schools are places for curing of ignorance, stupidity is not tolerated in schools. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that few other people share this point of view. Certainly none of them are Fearless Leaders.

It seems to me that we go out of our way to accept and even encourage stupidity in both our students and staff. The latest example of this has come in the form of a sign. Not some great mystical sign that was accompanied by choirs of angels nor even a dark and ominous sign that sent an eerie chill down the spine. The latest example of stupidity run amok in our schools is an actual sign.

This sign appeared on the gate that leads into our courtyard. The gate automatically swings shut and locks and only school staff have the keys. The courtyard is for the use of the students and doesn’t contain any building machinery or access points. Wait, you can’t read the sign because of my crappy photography? Here, try this:

Why on earth does the maintenance department need to have exclusive access to this courtyard? What are they doing in there? Could this possibly explain why after 30 years of operation the ceiling to our school still isn’t completed, the roof leaks, our water pipes are rusting out, and no one can seem to figure out how the HVAC system is supposed to operate? Of course all of this completely ignores the point that I have NEVER seen maintenance enter the school here. They will park their trucks all over every part of the campus and even idle their diesel engines directly outside of my classroom, but I’ve never seen them enter the building through the courtyard.

This sign took someone actual time to print out and zip tie (keep it classy, folks) it to the gate. Time this person could have spent actually doing maintenance on the school. The only way this sign could be more ridiculous would be if you hung it around the neck of our maintenance staff and changed it to read, “Hard at work.”

No doubt there are dedicated and intelligent people working for the maintenance department. It is just as obvious that there are blithering idiots working there as well. The fact this is tolerated at every level of this school seems to run counter to the stated purpose of schools.

I really want to make my own sign and zip tie it beside this one. Any ideas on what it should say?