Somewhere over the Rainbow

[cornerofmadness]

My trip to Kansas was interesting to say the least.
I was of two minds from the get-go a) I’m not keen on going to Kansas but as a first time teacher I don’t have the luxury of being picky b) they don’t want me to come there and teach so they can see how I do like all the other interviews I’ve had which I find curious, c) If I’m not showcasing my teaching abilities then they could have asked their questions on the phone like everyone else. While I do want to see the place, I would rather have saved hundreds of dollars.
I don’t know how I did it, since I made both hotel and rental car reservations based on my plane tickets, but I mistook the departures times (mom made the reservations because she wanted the mileage on her US air card so I’ll pay her back). A) I had no idea that it was a connecting flight (again how blind was I?) B) no clue that it left at 7:30AM. I thought it left at 9:30 A which was when it was landing in Charlotte. I wouldn’t have known if hadn’t looked to email Sharon the flight number so she could pick me up on Saturday. I would have missed my flight if I hadn’t done that (which given how bad the day before my trip was I wouldn’t have been surprised to miss my plane. I was at work and destroyed files on three computers before it became clear that my sign-on had a virus or Marco or some damn thing attached to it that wiped out files. That should have been an omen).
So now Sharon can’t drive me to the airport as planned. No biggie. The big deal was I found this all out at midnight and I’d have to get up at 4AM to get to my plane. That wouldn’t’ be bad if a) I could sleep on planes which I can’t, b) if I didn’t have to drive 375 miles once I landed c) if I weren’t a night owl and going to bed that early was killing me. At least I remembered to look at the weather on Yahoo. I saw it was 80 the day before and only supposed to be 50 when I landed. Great I think, drastic drops like that are perfect tornado spawning weather. I pack a jacket. I get into bed and wake up an hour later thinking ‘damn it I forgot to pack my interview dress which I had left to last so it would wrinkle less.’ I jump out of bed and pack it.
I get no sleep but at least the plane ride to Charlotte and KC are good. I get to the rental place and the guy gets belligerent because I don’t want to upsize my car for 10$ more a day. He’s arguing it’s a brand new car with 10 miles on it, wouldn’t that be better than a smaller car with 18,000 miles on it. I’m thinking I own a small car with 90,000 miles on it, I think I’ll be just fine, not to mention the price of gas. I don’t want to be in a gas pig. I insist on the car I actually reserved. He says ‘fine, here’s your Chevy Classic." I ask "A classic what?" Oddly enough that’s the name of the car even if I’ve never heard of such a beast (Sharon had the same reaction when I told her so I feel better). I get to the car and can’t turn on the wipers. Now the wiper pod turns. It shows you how to turn it to get the various speeds and I need it since it’s pouring. I go back and ask what’s up. They can’t figure it out either. Well no one is sure WHY it has a pod that turns with arrows that show you where to turn it since that’s not how it works (thanks Chevy). You have to push in and up to make them go. Fine, so I’m on my way. I brought tapes for the trip. This car’s fancier than mine. It has a cd player. Sigh. (However the trunk and driver’s door refuse to shut without a lot of force and they liked to pop, again great Chevy workmanship).
So off I go across the plains. It’s bitterly col and raining. The wind is incredible. I start out west. Eastern Kansas is okay, nice rolling green hills. I get homesick for Pennsylvania or heck even Wisconsin and South Dakota. You get past Topeka and it flattens out. Central and Western Kansas define flat as a pancake. I can’t imagine Lex Luthor not taking his millions and fleeing, leaving Smallville far behind (watch some native Kansasian read this and get mad. Let’s just say I’m not a flatlander. I need my hills). I swear if I looked south I could see all the way to Oklahoma and if I looked north there’s Nebraska.
I-70 is an easy drive even in the constant rain, barring one thing. Either my speedometer was WAY off or no one in Kansas is in a hurry. The speed limit is 70 m.p.h. I was doing about 72. I was passing everyone like they were sitting still. I get to the middle of the state and see a billboard for Colby "the Oasis of the Plains" which is my destination. I’m excited until I realize the billboard says it’s STILL 3 hours away (it’s about a 5 ½ hr drive). Who the hell puts up a billboard for something three hours away. Well, there ain’t a damn thing out there besides that so I guess that’s why. The other billboards that are a constant are the anti-abortion ones every 5 miles which after half a state of this makes you want to run out and do it just to spite them for littering the roadside with their propaganda. I could live with a few billboards, free speech and all that but every few miles for 100's of miles isn’t free speech it’s an assault.
Hayes is the next big city. I pick up a country station in that area that’s good when on play list but you let the locals make requests and it’s 1973 (in fact disco is huge out there. I found at least three stations). Colby is about 100 miles from Hayes and I get there eventually. I’m not sure WHY it’s an oasis. All I saw were hotels, fast food places, gas stations and travel plazas, oh and the college which is a block from the Super 8 I’m staying at.
Oddly enough there’s a Wal-mart and a steak house (though I don’t see an actual town anywhere). I get back to the hotel in time to watch Frazier. I miss the clip show because I forgot everything starts at 7 in central time but I get to see the end. I liked it. It was hopeful and the plot wasn’t retarded as a lot of series finales are. While I haven’t watched the show in the last few years except sporadically, I’ll miss it. I’ve been watching Frazier as a character for 20 years. It’s sort of like saying goodbye to an old friend.
As it turns out it got bitterly cold in Kansas that night, down to about 25 degrees. The wheat froze (expect bread, flour etc to go up in price). TWENTY tornadoes touched down during that drive (what did I say about me and the weather) luckily, as far as I could tell, I wasn’t near it. Sheesh. Welcome to Kansas.
The next day I trundle to the college. By now I’ve seen enough of the place to leave my lucky acorns behind. I don’t want luck on this trip. I might actually end up trapped her hoping to find my way over the rainbow. And oh my god it’s like I’m in Steppford. Everyone is so happy about Colby (which in the light of day is still as flat and featureless as it was in the rainy gloom). Even the guy at the visitor center I stopped at afterwards is ecstatic about the place. All these happy smiling people made me nervous. So the head of the department takes me on the grand tour. The science building is so old therer’re chalk boards, not white boards, no Smart rooms, hell I’m lucky there’s an overhead projector. I’m getting depressed.
I know there’s no money to update this place. On my drive I heard that Kansas school system has no budget. The schools won’t open in the fall until there is one and they’re NOT expecting to open the schools until very late in the year as a result. It’s down right dire. Every prof at the college mentioned it (hell the position might dry up because community colleges are publically funded).
As we tour the building, he asks me would I be willing to teach a math course. Maybe it was the panic in my eyes that made him hurriedly add "it’s check book math. A lot of our students can’t do multiplication and division" I’m thinking have you LOOKED at my transcripts. Do you see the C’s in math? Yes they’re in calculus and differential equations but I can’t do math. I’m dyslexic. That’s why they put me in the special testing areas when I’m in chemistry class so I have no distractions. I CRY when I do math I get that anxious. I lie and say ‘I think so.’
We tour some more. I see everything. Find ONE multimedia room. Find out the last prof left because she couldn’t get a cadaver lab (they have no smart rooms and she thought she’d get a cadaver lab. Forget the red tape out the wazoo, that costs $$$$) I get dropped off at the president’s office and then the assistant dean’s. They tell me about the usual class (i.e. middle aged WHITE people. There is no diversity here. Heck they’re looking at me funny with my brunette hair.)
I go to the interview meeting. Far less straight science profs here. The one who took me on the tour and a math prof, then there’s assistant physical therapist, a nurse, a dental hygienist and the agriculture biology prof who’s also the rodeo coach (we have no smart rooms but we DO compete in the rodeo it seems). He kinda looks like the Marlboro man and if I were interested in men in their 40's he’d be cute (but since I prefer men a bit younger than that, I just take a look at the huge rodeo buckle on his belt and move on).
They ask the typical questions, the same questions everyone else asked me on the phone. I do okay. I know the answers by now but they didn’t like my answers of using the internet to help the students learn on their own to supplement my teaching and to do research papers. Most of their students don’t have computers. Then they asked me did I think I could take it down a few steps because their students wouldn’t understand anatomy/phys at my level...oh dear god. Now, don’t get me wrong, they keep telling me how great their students are but then they tell me they can’t add and subtract and that they’d never understand anatomy at my level and I have to wonder what they’re turning out. Anatomy/phys is a HUGE class in community college (any college really) because all the health modalities must take it. X-ray tech, dental hygienist, nurses, nursing assistants etc etc all must have this course and they want me to take it down a peg. I’m scared.
They let me ask questions. My first question is, um where the heck do I live and how much does it cost. No one knows since no one lives in the town. A lot of them live 100 miles away back in Hayes, which by the way is the closest mall. They tell me all the great things I can do if I live in the area. ALL these things are in Denver CO, 235 miles away. That’s the next nearest mall. Shoot me. I know I’m the Cosmic Fool. I hear God laughing at this point. I get out of there and I do stop at a few gas stations, the grocery store and the visitor center looking for apartment guides. They don’t exist. I even ASK and they tell me the price of houses (which ain’t cheap, a lot like their gas which is 20cents more than in FL).
I drive like the devil’s behind me all the way back to Kansas City. I still hear that otherworldly laughter. I get to KC (which at least is a civilized city) and this Super 8 I’m in is weird, not even having a clock which I get obsessed over. I don’t own a watch but I have to have that clock radio which I do get from them. I fly home the next day on a jam packed plane (no shocker. I don’t get to go to Charlotte again, oh no I go to my nemesis, O’Hare airport). I of course get tagged for the strip down and get examined treatment. Note to self, travel in jogging pants. Rivets in blue jeans just prolongs the process. I sit down and there’s all this unattended baggage. A locked carry on, a briefcase, a diaper bag and a car seat. You can see everyone getting more and more nervous as no one claims it. After a half hour I’m about to tell the security guard who’s sitting right there IGNORING it when the people reclaim it. Middle Easterners. I thought the other people in the air port were going to shit a brick. I’m thinking they’d have to be really die-hard extremists to try anything since they had all FOUR of their kids with them including a baby on the bottle.
We all board the plane, that luggage never getting rechecked btw. I’m seated next to this cute little girl who’s a Kansas native (and can’t wait to leave). She’s going to go to school at the University of Wisconsin in a few months. Well, since I used to live in Madison we have something to talk about. She’s a journalism major into theatre (i.e. she’s what me and all my friends used to be). We talk. She tells me not to go to Kansas. I get to O’Hare and we’re an hour behind schedule (and lucky me I land a half hour early). Well as I wait on this plane from Boston to get out of the way of my gate, a pilot shows up for that trip sharing thing they do and he’s late. The gate has been retracted. His e-ticket is lost. They call and call and finally get it. The gate goes out and he gets on. The gate gets sucked back up and a half dozen other travelers appear. They didn’t realize the crowd at the gate was for Orlando and somehow missed repeated calls for Boston. Back out goes the gate. WHY this takes another hour no one knows.
We get onboard. They give us School of Rock for free to make up for the nearly 3 hour delay. My headphones are broken. There are no replacements. Sigh. I get to Orlando and hey for once O’Hare didn’t kill my luggage. I get to the car and off I go for the toll road. Some moron tourist (I’m guessing) stops DEAD in the middle lane of a three lane road to read the signs (presumably) I swerve one way and the car behind me swerves the other and I MISS my offramp as a result. I’m now on a toll road that I don’t know where it goes. My cell phone is dead so I can’t call the cops on this idiot. I have to pay a total of 2.50$ to get on and off the other toll road. I finally get home, get some Steak and Shake since I’ve had nothing to eat since 10 am and it’s now nearly midnight and collapse.
And worse thing is, I am really hoping I don’t get this job. Think Utah or Jacksonville for me (or better yet think hard on Wisconsin giving me an interview!)

Comments

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

PUPPY. STAYS.

Sit.

Stay.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

Puppy knows NONE of those commands

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

Well...true.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

SHe's now full of sand. You've been warned.

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

Like Rogue is ever anything but either full of sand or dripping wet?

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

excellent point