Special Orders

 I talked to a lot of parents last week. Not one of them was outwardly upset with me or the school for which I work about starting the year with distance learning. If there was an undercurrent of tension, it was felt primarily in the way they approached the technological hoops through which they were asked to jump. By the second day of school, I had parent trooping back to my station, Mister Caven's Computer Corner, where they would huff and pull out the loaned Chromebook they had borrowed for their child to use and puff something to the tune of "This doesn't work."

Suddenly, I was projected back to another time. A time when I waited on customers who wanted Arby's Roast Beef sandwiches. Inevitably, no more than once a day, one of those customers would wait in line for a second time to let me know that their sandwich was not up to par. Their suggested solution to this problem was that I would ask the person behind the meat slicer to make them a new one. Which, to this day, seems hysterical to me. The chances of us making an identically subpar sandwich within the minutes that it took to make the first one sit somewhere squarely at one hundred percent. Conditions being what they are, in a fast food restaurant during lunch rush, you're probably not going to get anything on the epicurean spectrum. You're going to get Arby's. Straight up. 

Back in the present, the parent who stands before me is asking me to solve their technology issues, which tend to be using the correct password. Or turning the machine on. Or in some cases, having a connection to Al Gore's Internet. This is what they are asking for outwardly, but somewhere just below the surface I can see the stress and anxiety that is weighing them down. They are parents. Not teachers. They have been cooped up in their homes with one or more children for five months and there is no quick end in sight. Desperation has begun to set in. 

One parent asked me, after I had practiced signing her daughter in to her Chromebook, "When will this end?" I chose not to play coy. I told her that the neighborhood we live in is one of the bright red ones on the COVID-19 map. "Do you think it's real?" she asked in the same defeated tone. I told her that I know that it is real, and I wish that I had a light to shine at the end of the tunnel. I wanted to reassure her with a date or a number of weeks that everything would return to normal. 

But I didn't have that to give. 

So I made her another roast beef sandwich and sent her on her way.