If only it was as simple as that. In the days of Joyce Grenfell getting Mrs Hingle to come and visit the children must have been a very straightforward process. I imagine that an invitation was issued and in came Mrs Hinge to watch the entertaining chaos that ensued in the fictitious classroom, including witnessing exactly what that was that George was doing.
This week, among other things, I had to arrange for a visitor to come in to school. It was not Mrs Hingle, sadly, but instead Miss Belinda. Who she? Well it doesn’t really matter who she is, but she was known to the excellent KL Shakespeare Players who came to perform their really good version of The Merchant of Venice at school yesterday.
I have written before about how difficult it is to get permission for a visitor to enter the school grounds, largely because there appears to be at least six different protocols, all used by different people, each of which is particular and peculiar to them and most of them don’t work in a straightforward manner. In my attempts to be as organized as possible I made sure that the names and car registration numbers of our actors had been pre-registered with the site guards so that they would not have to argue with the guards n their way in. All was well until the aforementioned Miss Belinda asked if she could come to watch the play too. Following the “the more the merrier” approach I said yes and collected her name and details accordingly. Ignoring the official process for getting visitors registered, knowing from previous attempts that it did not work, I instead emailed the guards directly, a method that I knew did work. I emailed, and all appeared to be working nicely.
Normally I get no response form the guards to my emails so I have to go and check with them that they have received my email, seemingly much to their annoyance, so I was genuinely quite baffled when I started to receive email replies to my message to the guards (security@…..my). This was most unusual, I thought…. until an art teacher offered to organise a whole staff welcome party for Miss Belinda, a DT teacher sent me a picture of Belinda Carlisle and asked if he could be her guide and various other people offered apparently helpful ways of getting visitors on site. Somehow or other, fueled by hassles, I had fallen victim to the school’s helpful google-powered email system. Instead of emailing security@…..my I had emailed secondaryteachers@….my. I quickly sent out a clarification email to secondaryteachers@….my and also to the guards and hoped for the best.
Then the phone started to ring. On the other end of the line was a person offering helpful advice. “Now Robin, what you need to do is….” Yes, thank you, right, ok, you see what I did was…. Then another email came in. “What you need to do is ….” The phone rang again. More advice. I went off to teach my first lesson, grumbling and mumbling.
In the gap between lessons one and two my colleagues had great joy in passing on the news that another helpful person had phoned to say explain what I needed to do and how she had contacted various other people to assist. Soon “other people” emailed me to make sure that I would meet and greet Miss Belinda as made up policy said that she could not be allowed to walk to where she was required to go by herself. All I needed now was for someone to approach me in the corridor and start singing “Ooo, heaven is a place on Earth.” Gradually the advice died down, the play started and the world continued spinning round.
Miss Belinda, of course, failed to turn up.