The Dog Ate My Resume

We had a Geometry teacher in High School who was well liked for telling great stories and giving easy grades but if a student asked a hard question his famous response was "I missed that day at school." After a while we got to thinking he must have been very sickly or delinquent for all the days he missed but we never thought to question his teaching skills, he just didn't know the answer. His main job was Basketball Coach but he had to teach other classes to make his pay and Geometry was on his schedule even if it wasn't his strong suit. At least he was honest.

Back in the first grade I did get sick and miss a day of school and when I got back the next day the teacher took time out to help me catch up with the previous day's work which consisted of one word: pie. Seriously that was a day’s work for a first grader in my day. That was the last time they ever helped me catch up on stuff that was missed. You didn't have to miss a whole day to miss the lesson, it could be anything from daydreaming to dyslexia, the results are the same.

Then later on in life I caught myself using that same lame excuse and I realized that using the ‘missed day at school’ routine was more trouble than good, so then I had to take time out of my adult life to unlearn that teacher's bad habit. That was when I first started looking for other bad things I might have accidentally learned along the way but how do you know it's wrong before it has been revealed? Everything still looks OK so there is no easy way to know which is the wrong idea.

I may not be sure how much bad stuff I did learn but once I got to looking I found all kinds of stuff that I didn't learn. Simple things that would seem obvious to anyone like, How to think. I never had that class, no how to guide, no FAQ , nothing. There should be memory tricks to make things easier to remember, and exercises to remember better. How to smell, how to listen, how to look and see, these were all taken for granted but I can tell I am still not using those skills to the full potential. The brain is such a powerful tool but there is no user manual. It feels like I’m not getting all the features and benefits.

Another variation on the "missed that day at school" is this similar excuse " They didn't teach that at my school". This puts the blame on the teacher, the principal, the school board or even the student body, anybody but the student themselves. Using these excuses is like carrying on the old tradition of the dog ate my homework, then he ate my resume and now the dog ate my career.

1960’s : Rich Kid Poor Kid

In PE Class we all had to line up in front of the bleachers for roll call and the kid next to me was named Hal Rowland and next to him was a fellow named Richard Poor so Hal always had to make a joke that he would never get ahead in life because he "was stuck between rich and poor". Every single day he had to bring it up and Richard seemed to dislike it more than I even though the ultimate irony was that the Poor’s did have more money than the Rich’s.

Hal's family was infamous for owning the cow that wandered onto the Highway and caused a terrible car crash that killed a married couple late one night. The victim's relatives sued for damages but the Open Range law said the drivers were liable and they even had to pay for the dead livestock. Talk about adding insult to injury, that made for some juicy gossip and even qualified as big news but it was an awful small town.

That same stretch of road also later claimed the life of Kim Westlake when his car hit some black ice on the way to a track meet early one morning. Kim was my first friend after we moved away from the Lake and he was the guy who showed me around Janesville school where I got to know Hal and it was Kim who first introduced us to Steve Blankenship. Steve was the one who’s Dad had a little farm near the big old empty farmhouse where we got caught shooting owls in the rafters of the barn out back and we all had to run for safety at Steve’s place but his Dad found us and made us go back, apologize and clean the barn and for the rest of the day.

The next year we weren't so lucky when we got nailed for throwing snowballs at cars from the top of the log pile at the mill and this time we had to face our parents at the police station and there were serious consequences, we had to haul hay for two days as punishment. That same Officer pulled us over again a year later and this time he had us red handed in the form of poached ducks, poached in the out of season and no license sense not the cooking poached. This time the punishment was hauling Christmas trees for the landowner and it was two full weekends of freezing cold and brutal work.

We were so sore and tired from our various chain-gang jobs we went home and watched TV where we caught the latest episodes of whatever was on which somehow seemed to ease the pain along with a hot meal and an even hotter bath. Years later there was the original TV series called Roots which spawned a bunch of copycat spinoff series and one of them was called Rich Man Poor Man. To this day any time I see or hear any reference to any of those shows it always reminds me of Hal Rowland who had to stand for roll-call between Poor Rich and Rich Poor.