22:30 until closing time

If an idle mind is a devil’s playground, how about a hyperactive mind with lots of idle time to burn?
Welcome to my peculiar life as an online teacher. We don’t have sales quota to beat, only a number of students to maintain and increase. We don’t have AHT but we have class schedules to keep. We don’t have irate customers we cannot see but we sometimes see rather indignant faces on the crisp video feed staring back at you if you missed a word. We never had culture training to prepare us, only grapevine lectures on what or what not to say.
I never thought I would ever be confined to a cubicle but here I am in a 4x3 cubbyhole painted in the shade of dark beige (I keep remembering a particular shade of a nail polish color). No flowers on the desk since the you have your LCD monitor, keyboard and your files. I opted for a mousepad with the Angel Sanctuary design instead of sticking with the company issued boring blues and beach sceneries. No USBs allowed, my webcam at home is way cooler than the one I have at work and I can practically hear everybody else with my single earpiece headset.
So what do we do with our free time? It really depends since Youtube and other streaming sites are banned. Online games were shut down months ago since they played havoc with the connections. We are allowed Facebook and other sites for surfing. I have my Multiply and Blogger to fiddle with. Of course, we have paperwork to deal with first like students’ performance records, attendance sheets (I’m really tempted to bring a class record here), class counts and the dreaded IR (see, we have them, too). After all is done, where do we turn to?
Almost everybody here is connected in Facebook and Friendster. But I ventured further, I’d like to say, by using going to sites that are rather bizarre and outlandish to the rest of my fellow teachers. Sites like www.peopleofwalmart.com and http://icanhascheezburger.com are good examples of websites they haven’t even heard of. But my favorite is www.darwinawards.com where anybody contemplating morosely of their lot in this world can get a laugh. But tonight, as of this writing, I found a site that just made my sleepiness go away. After typing a random line of words, for example, get revenge on your ex, and actual sites came up. Getrevengeonurex.com is one site and, well, no free galleries. The services offered are tempting but the dollar price tag was enough to stop me.
Idle time…idle hands…hyperactive minds…..
Let’s go home before Halloween starts early this year.
(to be continued)