Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The early bird catches the call

The phone started ringing at 6 a.m. today and rang six times before 7--but that's better than yesterday, when the calls started at 5 and kept on into midmorning. With all kinds of germs invading the county schools, the resident substitute teacher is in high demand. If my husband could clone himself, he could teach in eight classrooms this morning--but he'll have his hands full filling just one.

Sometimes he gets no sub calls for days or weeks at a time, and then we have weeks like this, when the calls start in the evening and continue early the next morning. Fortunately, most of the schools in the county now use automated calls and there's no need to be polite to the robo-voice that interrupts your dreams at 5 a.m. But my husband is always polite, even when he's talking to a machine. It would never occur to him to drag a caller into whatever nightmare the call might have interrupted. That's what makes him a better person than I am...and that's why he's in charge of answering the phone when it rings at 5 a.m.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There is a school somewhere in our county that has had an issue with its night calling system lately. When the robo-voice calls, it keeps looping until someone accepts the job. The problem is that the school is not identified, so noone can accept the job. This doesn't happen often, as I would imagine the school normally has a person make the calls during the day. That's probably why they don't seem know about the problem. Those of us on the receiving end of these calls can't even report the problem, because we don't know the name of the culprit school. We just have to deal with up to 10 - 11 calls from the time they start until the clock strikes ten. ANNOYING!!! Tell Garry I feel his pain! Bets