A Day in the Life of a Principal

Sometimes things happen around me that are so damn funny, I fear I cannot do them justice with the written word. But I will try with this. Stick with me as this takes a bit.

Our school was destroyed so the kids are in another church’s religious ed rooms. Lovely facility. The problem, however, is there is no playground and there was no place for our principal and his secretary. One of the parents is a builder, so he had a trailer placed for them to use as office space. The trailer is on the back of the classrooms, sitting on the big big parking lot that the kids also use for recess and PE.

When you walk into this trailer, you walk into the secretary’s office. Take a right and you go down this 2 foot hallway into the other half, the principal’s office. Now my treasurey files have been in his office taking space for awhile, so last week, they decided to move them into what I thought was a closet. Assessing the women in the room, it became apparent that I was the only person besides Mr. H. that could move these enormous file cabinets. So with hand truck and leg power, he and I moved them into what I thought was a closet. It is not. It is a bathroom. A non-functioning bathroom as there is no water hook up into this trailer.

My joke has been, “Wow. Thank you so much for providing me a seat while I go through my files!” Every morning I walk in and every morning I tap on his door and ask Mr. H if it’s OK for me to go into my office and get my files. We all laugh. Until this morning…

I walk in and the secretary says to me, “I have something I have to tell you.” It is a grim sound. I said, “Oh please tell me we have not overspent. I am watching that account like a hawk!” (Our finances are in shambles too now that the school was destroyed.) She replies, “No, no, no… nothing like that…” and she waits for the little kids in the office to clear out.

It appears that a little girl went in there a couple days ago… and took a dump…in the non functioning potty…. that is part of the principal’s office. Basically, she took a dump in MY office. Now they are all horrified and I’m laughing so hard, I have tears in my eyes. Apparently, the secretary was hemming the pants for J’s kids for the funeral and when J.'s youngest came in to try on the pants, he came out of the bathroom and said, “Mrs. M, it really really stinks in there,” to which her reply was, “Oh sweetie, I know. This entire trailer stinks” and he said, “No. I mean it REALLY stinks.” That’s when it was found. Within hours the stench was seeping into the principal’s office… to his desk.

I walk in this morning as they are deciding what to do about it. There are buckets, chlorox, paper towels, a disposable commode cleaner, newspapers… you name it. The secretary is completely skeeved out. The principal, who cracks me up, is totally non plussed by the entire situation. Watching them together is comedy in itself. She walks out of the trailer for MORE cleaning supplies, and he walks into the offending closet saying to me, “I don’t see what the big deal is. What is the difference between people poop and dog poop?” And I’m thinking, “Wow. I cannot believe I’m having a poop conversation with the principal of our school.”

She comes back and he has removed 'it' with papertowels and newspapers and he also has buckets of water so they can clean. She’s getting more and more whacked about it, saying, “Don’t flush it! Don’t flush it! We don’t know where the pipe comes out.” She ends with, “I’m going outside with a bucket to find the pipe so we can catch it.” She leaves and he looks at me and says, “We want to catch this?! I don’t want to catch this stuff in a bucket! What is the big deal?” and he goes into his people poop /dog poop comparison…

I’m laughing and saying, “Mr. H, dogs don’t have infectious diseases and AIDS, people do” . He turns and replies, “Mrs. L, my kids do NOT have AIDS, “ and with that, he FLUSHES it. I’m laughing and gasping. SHE comes back in and she’s yelling, “You flushed it!”

We walk outside and that pipe… it juts right out from the trailer, pointing out at the parking lot. There are wads of nasty toilet paper and ick right there in the parking lot. Mr. H. says, “Hmm. I think I shouldn’t have flushed it. Maybe catching it would have been better” as he is using bleach and paper towels to pick up all this nasty toilet paper sewage from next to the trailer.

I am laughing even harder. I can’t figure out what has done it, watching this whole Mars/Venus thing with the excrement or watching the principal roll up his sleeves and take care of it… or the thought of them discovering some kid had taken a dump in his office…

I will tell you… I have enormous respect for this man now. He would not ask anyone to do something he himself would not do.

We now have the lid to the commode duct taped down so nobody else will inadvertently use it.