It's a library not a pub
So many school stories .... clearly there is much repressed anger out there!

Anyway, our suffering at the local grammar school was mainly caused by a jumped-up piggy-faced little twerp of an English teacher. Returning in your 60s to teach at the school you attended as a teenager clearly says something about you, and in his case it says that he was a smug little git who thought he was God's gift to the English teaching profession.

This being a grammar school, the library was open at lunchtime and we used to use it. For it's proper purpose, sometimes. The only fly in the ointment (oinkment?) was this teacher, who was responsible for the library and therefore had a disconcerting habit of actually going there at lunch and strutting around generally puffing himself up.

Anyway, at the end of lunch he would announce "Time, Gentlemen, Please" (yes, t'was a boy's grammar school) in some form of highly witty and grandiose impression of a barman. Which we all thought was terribly funny and completely un-pretentious. Not.

So, one day, a young lad by the name of Bateman is in the library and fails to respond to the calling of time quickly enough to satisfy the little egomaniac. So what does he shout? At full volume? In a library?

"AND THAT INCLUDES YOU, MASTER BATEMAN!!"

Cue 100 or so lads falling about laughing and much loss of face.

(Anyway, he also lost my essay once, blamed it on me, and nearly made me fail an O level as a result, so 21 years later I wrote up his embarassment on b3ta to get my own back)
(patently Was somewhere else on, Mon 30 Apr 2007, 15:48, Reply)