The day I discovered WTF
We moved when I was 8 or so, and that meant a different school. Miss Swift was a teacher there, not having a class of her own, but just patching the gaps other teachers' time off created. I'd describe her as a born spinster - she mustn't have been long over 30 but she dressed like an old lady and looked and acted like the announcer from Acorn Antiques.

There are numerous odd, nitpicky and frankly bigoted things she did during my time there pretty much from when I arrived, such as bringing morning assembly to a halt during the lord's prayer because I wasn't holding my hands together in the correct cherubic-munchkin-on-xmas-cards fashion - quote "Someone doesn't know how to pray". I suspected even then that religion was bullshit, but at 8 years old I was too scared of the woman to point it out. The out-and-out oddest, though, was when we had a bloke from the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, for the non-brits amongst you) come to do a slideshow for our class and for some reason she did the talking. Whenever a bird like a stork or crane came on the screen, or any bird that doesn't tuck its feet into its feathers during flight, she added to the cue card's description a few words on her personal disdain for that method of flying and her preference for the tidier 'gear up' way. There were other scattered comments on plumage, but the feet thing was obviously a bugbear for her.

The class and the RSPB bloke exchanged looks a few times during the presentation, and I do really name it as the day I discovered WTF, because I don't remember experiencing it quite so strongly before as to identify it as a sentiment in itself. I mean, think about it - WTF did it matter to her/was she taking/must her homelife have been like/must the slideshow bloke have thought/was she doing in charge of us/do birds care anyway as long as we don't fuck them about? And that's just a few that occurred to me.

I often wonder what Miss Swift is doing now, and to whom.
(thatblokeoverthere not quite as much an arsehole as I thought, Wed 9 Nov 2005, 20:17, Reply)