Please Stay Tuned For Further Announcements
I am sitting on the bus trying to doze for the last few minutes before it reaches the stop nearest my office. The speaker right about my head crackles with a sound not unlike ladyfinger firecrackers detonating two blocks away before a canned voice dispenses these words of wisdom:
“Noo Yawk is a fast paced town. You can do yaw pawt to keep things moving by exiting through the centuh daws.”
I hear this announcement almost every morning and marvel at the fatal flaw it contains. Express buses do not have a center door. You might think this is a design error but it makes sense since the nature of an express bus is that it picks up passengers in one borough and drops them off in another. Except for the odd transfer there aren’t any stops where people are both boarding and departing the bus.
I muttered something like “fantastic, I'll kick the middle window out” aloud and was momentarily paralyzed by fear. Instantly I was transported back almost 30 years to the scene of one of my first failures in the academic world. It was in the 6th grade and I remember it clearly. And it was in homeroom of all things. Do they even have homeroom any more? I imagine today’s go-go hyper scheduled onward-and-upward achievement-oriented kid world doesn’t have time for something like homeroom. Back in 1978, homeroom was sort of the clerical time of the day. You reported to a particular classroom for around 10 minutes and had your attendance taken, any sort of paperwork that you had to give to your parents distributed and did the pledge of allegiance bit. Did anyone else out there ever make up their own words to the pledge of allegiance? I know it’s unthinkable in our post-9/11 hyper-patriotic society but back in the last quarter of the 20th century kids would make up their own words to the pledge strictly for amusement purposes. Kind of like this Beavis and Butthead clip.
There was nothing overtly political about it (we were 6th graders, after all) Mainly it was an exercise to see how many potty-related words you could work in and still have it sound like you were saying the real deal. It wasn’t the pledge that got me in trouble however. It was what followed the pledge.
The morning announcements.
I suppose I had an ear for the banal, officious and ludicrous at an early age. There was no other explanation for what transpired during the morning announcements. Bear in mind that I was not the head class clown by any means. I mean sure, every once in a while I could pull off some masterpiece of kid wit. I remember one time in particular during science class the teacher (who happened to also be my homeroom teacher) instructed us to open our textbooks to a particular page and as he turned to write on the blackboard I said in a nasally cartoon mobster-like voice whose origin is lost to me now “HO-Kay bawwwwss!”
He snapped around and faced the class. “Who said that? Who said O K boss?” Silence. The kid code of non-tattling was being followed. This code was particularly powerful growing up on Staten Island since many folks are employed in the, uh, olive oil importing business. Or so I've been told. Anyway, as soon as I realized nobody was going to rat me out I knew even if they didn’t laugh the effort was appreciated on some level. Unfortunately this incident only served to feed my need to perform which led to my ultimate downfall.
Parent teacher conferences were always a good day for me. I was an honors student although I wasn’t the cream of the crop by any stretch. With a minimum of effort I kept my average in the high 80s to low 90s which was enough to keep the teachers and my parents off my back though they sometimes suspected I was coasting and could do better. They were right, of course but being a high achiever has never been in my personality. Still, I accompanied my mother to her chat with all the teachers and waited in the hallway outside each room as she got the usual report which based on my mother’s feedback I imagine was along the lines of “Yes, he’s a good boy, does OK, needs to focus a bit more, needs to pay attention a bit more, but generally he does fine.”
All was well until we got to my homeroom/science teacher.
At this point in my young academic career science was one of my stronger subjects. I was good with basic concepts and interested in how the universe operated. Science would lose me later in life when calculus was introduced, but at the tender age of 11 or 12 I was still thoroughly interested. This was going to be easy, I thought, and then we can go, I can get a special pizza lunch and maybe wrangle some dough out of mom for some baseball cards and comic books. I waited confidently in the hallway as mom went in to talk to the teacher.
A few minutes later she emerged and I excitedly anticipated effusive praise. Imagine my surprise when I looked at her face and saw that she looked angry and embarrassed.
“What’s this about talking back to the announcements?”
“W-w’-what?” I could see ghostly images of baseball cards drifting out of my grasp.
“Your teacher said you are very disrespectful to the announcements. He says you talk back to the loudspeaker. He thinks you have a problem.”
“Well they say stupid things sometimes. I just make fun of them. ”
“Well YOU should learn to be quiet. The most dangerous thing you have is your mouth. You should learn to keep it closed or people will think you’re crazy. I’m very embarrassed and disappointed in you.”
There it went. The pizza lunch, the money for baseball cards, all down the drain. All because I couldn’t sit still and listen to the drivel they spouted over the PA system every morning without adding my commentary.
You might think I learned the bigger lesson that day. You might think I realized that it doesn’t really matter what you do in a classroom or an office, that the quality of work is almost irrelevant in many occupations as long as you don’t rock the boat and go with the flow. You might think I took the lesson they tried to teach me that day and applied it to my everyday life to become an upstanding citizen, a dutiful follower and a fine American consumer. I’m sure my life would be different if I had, but I didn’t. Instead, I’m sitting on the bus mumbling back to the loudspeaker.
Some people never learn.
“Noo Yawk is a fast paced town. You can do yaw pawt to keep things moving by exiting through the centuh daws.”
I hear this announcement almost every morning and marvel at the fatal flaw it contains. Express buses do not have a center door. You might think this is a design error but it makes sense since the nature of an express bus is that it picks up passengers in one borough and drops them off in another. Except for the odd transfer there aren’t any stops where people are both boarding and departing the bus.
I muttered something like “fantastic, I'll kick the middle window out” aloud and was momentarily paralyzed by fear. Instantly I was transported back almost 30 years to the scene of one of my first failures in the academic world. It was in the 6th grade and I remember it clearly. And it was in homeroom of all things. Do they even have homeroom any more? I imagine today’s go-go hyper scheduled onward-and-upward achievement-oriented kid world doesn’t have time for something like homeroom. Back in 1978, homeroom was sort of the clerical time of the day. You reported to a particular classroom for around 10 minutes and had your attendance taken, any sort of paperwork that you had to give to your parents distributed and did the pledge of allegiance bit. Did anyone else out there ever make up their own words to the pledge of allegiance? I know it’s unthinkable in our post-9/11 hyper-patriotic society but back in the last quarter of the 20th century kids would make up their own words to the pledge strictly for amusement purposes. Kind of like this Beavis and Butthead clip.
There was nothing overtly political about it (we were 6th graders, after all) Mainly it was an exercise to see how many potty-related words you could work in and still have it sound like you were saying the real deal. It wasn’t the pledge that got me in trouble however. It was what followed the pledge.
The morning announcements.
I suppose I had an ear for the banal, officious and ludicrous at an early age. There was no other explanation for what transpired during the morning announcements. Bear in mind that I was not the head class clown by any means. I mean sure, every once in a while I could pull off some masterpiece of kid wit. I remember one time in particular during science class the teacher (who happened to also be my homeroom teacher) instructed us to open our textbooks to a particular page and as he turned to write on the blackboard I said in a nasally cartoon mobster-like voice whose origin is lost to me now “HO-Kay bawwwwss!”
He snapped around and faced the class. “Who said that? Who said O K boss?” Silence. The kid code of non-tattling was being followed. This code was particularly powerful growing up on Staten Island since many folks are employed in the, uh, olive oil importing business. Or so I've been told. Anyway, as soon as I realized nobody was going to rat me out I knew even if they didn’t laugh the effort was appreciated on some level. Unfortunately this incident only served to feed my need to perform which led to my ultimate downfall.
Parent teacher conferences were always a good day for me. I was an honors student although I wasn’t the cream of the crop by any stretch. With a minimum of effort I kept my average in the high 80s to low 90s which was enough to keep the teachers and my parents off my back though they sometimes suspected I was coasting and could do better. They were right, of course but being a high achiever has never been in my personality. Still, I accompanied my mother to her chat with all the teachers and waited in the hallway outside each room as she got the usual report which based on my mother’s feedback I imagine was along the lines of “Yes, he’s a good boy, does OK, needs to focus a bit more, needs to pay attention a bit more, but generally he does fine.”
All was well until we got to my homeroom/science teacher.
At this point in my young academic career science was one of my stronger subjects. I was good with basic concepts and interested in how the universe operated. Science would lose me later in life when calculus was introduced, but at the tender age of 11 or 12 I was still thoroughly interested. This was going to be easy, I thought, and then we can go, I can get a special pizza lunch and maybe wrangle some dough out of mom for some baseball cards and comic books. I waited confidently in the hallway as mom went in to talk to the teacher.
A few minutes later she emerged and I excitedly anticipated effusive praise. Imagine my surprise when I looked at her face and saw that she looked angry and embarrassed.
“What’s this about talking back to the announcements?”
“W-w’-what?” I could see ghostly images of baseball cards drifting out of my grasp.
“Your teacher said you are very disrespectful to the announcements. He says you talk back to the loudspeaker. He thinks you have a problem.”
“Well they say stupid things sometimes. I just make fun of them. ”
“Well YOU should learn to be quiet. The most dangerous thing you have is your mouth. You should learn to keep it closed or people will think you’re crazy. I’m very embarrassed and disappointed in you.”
There it went. The pizza lunch, the money for baseball cards, all down the drain. All because I couldn’t sit still and listen to the drivel they spouted over the PA system every morning without adding my commentary.
You might think I learned the bigger lesson that day. You might think I realized that it doesn’t really matter what you do in a classroom or an office, that the quality of work is almost irrelevant in many occupations as long as you don’t rock the boat and go with the flow. You might think I took the lesson they tried to teach me that day and applied it to my everyday life to become an upstanding citizen, a dutiful follower and a fine American consumer. I’m sure my life would be different if I had, but I didn’t. Instead, I’m sitting on the bus mumbling back to the loudspeaker.
Some people never learn.
Comments
It just felt weird, and in my mind I equated the forced pledging of our loyalty to nothing short of what I saw in historical films about dictator countries and crazy cults.
-Dan
Then I found out that some flavors of the Judeo-Christian religions forbid such a thing because it violates the "worshiping graven images" bit from the Bible. Having seen what happned with the golden calf in "The Ten Commandments" I could see why you wouldn't want to piss your God off in that fashion.
Ultimately though I think its easier for people to follow a symbol rather than an idea. It's very hard to get humans to rally around an abstract concept but if you can take a piece of cloth or a trinket and instill some kind of meaning in it they'll charge to their deaths for it. We are an odd species.