I don’t know if our Board is weird/unique or what have you, but there are a disproportionate number of ways they can contact us, as staff.
To call it redundant would be an insulting, libelous, slander to redundancy. Let me walk you through the 9 (NINE! Are you kidding me!) ways that we can be communicated at:
- Mail: For real. Regular, postal service mail and our in-school mailbox system of paper slips from guidance, the library, the main office, special education and what-have-you. It’s almost quaint in its old-tymey-ness, so I barely even resent it. Don’t get me wrong -I do resent it, but not on the scale of some of these other intrusions.
- Home (landline) Phone Number: Okay, admittedly, this was given when I was first hired. It is still valid, and (I’m guessing here) will only be used in the event of a global communications meltdown to let me know whether or not school was cancelled. It might be used to contact my spouse to let her know I’ve been hurt in a chalky-hands related disaster, but they actually already have…
- My Spouse’s Cell Number: Just in case I cut my thumbs off using a paper chopper and need to be medi-evac’ed by an actual chopper to the hospital.
- My Cell: I’ve gotten voicemail here from work, but I also get texts from other teachers, VPs and the Principal. None of the messages are ever good news. Why in the hell did I give them my real number?
- My Work number: It doesn’t actually ring - it just goes through to a voicemail box with the...slowest… robot… voice… menu… devised. I hate it. On principle (the principle of forgetfulness) I only check my voicemail once a month. Why not more often? Because...
- Our Department/School Phone/Paging me in my class: If there is an honest to goodness emergency (or even some shit that doesn’t live in the same time zone as an emergency) the main office/our department each have their own respective number that can be used to talk to a human who will page my class and interrupt a lesson.
- ‘Work only’ Email. Hosted on Board servers and using the worst donkey-balls-of-a-software web interface to connect. It has extremely limited storage space and the SPAM filter is fooled more often than a senior citizen talking to Nigerian royalty. And, AND! inside this email account there are at least three separate folders/message boards I’m expected to read. I’m going to be a sport and not count those as distinct channels to contact me.
- Student email: Hosted with Google and the only email with any reasonable amount of storage space so I obviously have to have all student work sent to this account for marking purposes. Probably the only one I don’t actively hate AND IT IS FULL OF GRADING TO DO! What does that say about all the other crap communication I receive? Nothing good.
- REMIND/CREW/Other contact App: I could be using all of them, but again, to be fair, I will lump them together. It was awesome when 100+ staff members all joined CREW this week and my phone twitched like a fentanyl junkie every few minutes with the canned “Mr. TECHMORON has joined CREW and wants to say HI” default test messages. Now I doubly hate my phone and triple-ly hate my coworkers. Great team building!
How many ways can your school contact you?
Can anyone beat my number?
