Some people......

GRAH! I'm in a very ticked off mood right now.

While I'm looking for a full time teaching position for the fall, I'm currently working for a local tutoring agency. If a student is suspended or out for medical reasons for a decent amount of time, I get the call to help tutor them. Two hours per week, at $25 per hour, that makes for a $50 session. Obviously, this is nowhere near what I would earn in a school, so I need every assignment that comes my way. The other day I received a call that a student in a nearby town needed two sessions before he went back to school. "Great!", I thought, "that's $100 I could use to pay some bills." I got in touch with the parent on Wednesday and set it up that I would meet the student on Friday (today) at the local library.

I get to the library today (a 30 minute drive from my house) and no student. I wait around a few minutes in the lobby, then wander around the library wondering if the student was already there and perhaps set himself up at a table somewhere. No student, so I wait in the lobby for a few more minutes. Finally, I give the mother a call and tell her that her son has not shown up yet. Her response is that the school decided he could come back starting today so he was there and obviously wouldn't be coming.

WTF! First off, why is the school ending his suspension early? Secondly, the parent had my phone number, so why couldn't she get off her lazy ass and call me sometime before I had to leave for the library? They knew he was going back, and we weren't meeting until 12:30pm, so she had the time to let me know it was cancelled. Worse, the school is going to let him catch up with his missed work there, so no tutoring is required. All I get to do is put down 1 hour for a missed session, since I was there but the student wasn't, reason be damned. So my $100 two session student, became a 90 minute $25 waste of time. The other $75 I'm out for, no chance to make it up, and I could have used that to pay off a bill or two.

I'll live, but how rude can you get? The parent knew her son wasn't going to be at the session, so instead of calling me Thursday or this morning and telling me the news, I have to drive 30 minutes, wait 30 minutes, and drive home 30 minutes wasting time that I could have spent doing something more constructive. Maybe if I'm lucky, she'll get hit by a bus.