Oh Charlene! Why have you forsaken me?

Q: If you find yourself in a pickle, how should you answer?

"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."
  
"If you tell the truth, then you don't have to remember anything."

 "Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it."
 —Mark Twain



That gal/pal Charlene sure knows how to party. He/she’s all about socializing at work. In fact, when this here omniscient narrator did a little role-playing himself as the acting school principal (which only lasted two hours) the melodrama began. I handed Charlene a memorandum requesting specific information on fifteen newly enrolled students; insignificant items (to my gal/pal anyway): reading, language, and mathematics grade levels, initial enrollment dates, and previous GED scores.

 You would’ve thought I asked for Charlene’s first-born. He/she tossed the memo aside, eliciting this response from yours truly: “Have that information in my mailbox by the end of your shift.”

 Reasonable? I thought so, considering he/she had 6 ½ more hours to work.

 Charlene left his/her secretary desk and stormed into the school principal’s office. I stood in the doorway.

 “Is there something you need in here?” I asked. He/she picked up the phone and started punching numbers. “Who’re you calling, Charlene?” I added.

 He/she slammed the receiver back into its cradle. “We’ll see what the deputy warden has to say about this!”

 “No problem … end of your shift,” I reminded him/her.

 Oh Charlene, why-why-why did you leave me feeling so empty inside? Why didn’t you give me a chance?

 When Charlene returned, he/she dumped me. “You’re no longer my immediate supervisor, the deputy warden is.”

 I’ve suffered rejection all my life. I held my emotions intact. “Good for you Charlene. End of my shift.”

 In the lunchroom the deputy warden approached. He explained to me that Charlene had called our boss vacationing in Florida and she in turn absolved my favorite gal/pal from answering to me. I, in turn, gave the deputy warden a copy of the memorandum. He looked puzzled.

 “I know …” I said.

 It took two full days, more game playing, and a classroom visit by the deputy warden to get the necessary documents for me to do my teaching job. The deputy warden hand delivered it himself. “Is that all?” he asked.

 “Well,” I said, “I have another dozen new students enrolled in my class, but I think I’ll wait until the school principal returns.”

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 Back to reality: My prayers go out to the corrections officer whose wife died this week from brain cancer. May she rest in peace.

Charlene, The Incredible He / She

Disclaimer: The account you’re about to read is purely fictional, made up, pulled from the vacuous spaces of Charlene’s head and told from another vantage point.


Charlene once stated that control center staff had photos of our former school corrections officer entering and exiting a crack-house in Port Huron. Of course, he/she said this after the fact, after his/her one-time working buddy had been fired.

Whether this crack-house story is true (which I doubt since the officer in question was given his job back) leads to one important question: Why is it that management lets Charlene stick his/her nose in places where it doesn’t belong?

Rumors spread like wildfire inside the prison system; all you’ve got to do is strike a match, drop it, and let the flames take-off. After a minor set-back, where Charlene called yours truly, the omniscient narrator, “a fucking idiot,” he/she planted a gossip seed of how I was on the chopping block, inches away from being fired. Of course, in order to go undetected Charlene did his/her planting with a(n) employee(s) from another prison.

“This,” a special education teacher, a young lady and lunch companion of Charlene, informed me, “is my last day at your facility.” Soon, she switched the subject from how she had been told her services were no longer needed to the subsequent, but unsubstantiated, demise of yours truly.

“Interesting,” I responded. “There’s truth to rumors, but I seriously doubt I’m going to get fired any time soon. In fact I just got a high-performance work evaluation.” What I didn’t tell her is that Charlene played a small, intricate role in her fate when she had left a book at our facility a few weeks back. She told me it was a book about relationships, but somehow word got out that it was a book about sex. Ouch! No one’s safe in the company of Charlene.