Plucky Letters to US soldiers in Iraq

Wednesday, September 21, 2005


Dear Army Guys,

Happy Last Day of summer to one and all! I’m certain you are much relieved to see the last of the summer of 2005. Let it pass now and forever into history. Be proud of yourselves and the progress you have made. Wear clean socks and watch out for those TV bombs. I read about them in Newsweek Magazine. Those things can actually jump at you from the side of the road. Stay off the roads. In fact, it might be a good idea for you to not go anyplace. Just tell everyone you’re grounded.

I have been much too busy the past couple of weeks. I’m headed for a too busy overload. I fear it won’t be long before I fall victim to spontaneous human combustion. I know this is entirely possible because I saw a program about it on the Sci-Fi Channel a few months ago. Ordinary people going about their business inexplicably burst into flames and burn to the ground. (Or, in some cases, burn into the synthetic material of their melted Laz-E-Boy recliners, which, really, when you think about it, is the ulitimate betrayal.)

I think my chances of falling victim to this phenomena increase as I move with ever greater rapidity through space and time. Just think of the friction I must create as I rush around trying to get things done. My god, I’m a walking Hindenburg! I could blow at any moment.
Oh, the humanity!

I considered carrying a fire extinguisher with me everywhere I go, but that’s impractical. Carrying a fire extinguisher around, even the small kind, is likely to draw embarrassing questions. People are unbelievably nosy these days; most wouldn’t hesitate to ask a rudely personal question like, “Why are you taking that fire extinguisher into the hot tub?” (Hey, they don’t call it “hot” for nothing, you know.)

I might have to invent a powerful fire extinguisher that will fit in my purse. I’m sure there are many other people besides me who live in fear of bursting into flames for no apparent reason. I’ll bet they will pay big bucks for my handy Purse & Pocket sized Spontaneous Personal Fire Extinguisher TM .

Ann was out sick for two weeks from our crucially important Lunch Lady duties. She suffered an inconvenient gall bladder removal. I had to train a new person to do my job while doing Ann’s work myself. The first week we had a good substitute, Mindy. I liked her very much and she was easy to supervise. Unfortunately, Mindy was not available the second week, and so we got the Lunch Lady Substitute from Hell.

Karen, a troll-like person, bounced into our school kitchen like a jaunty bag of unrestrained potatoes. She looked like a 300lb humanoid bean bag chair in desperate need of sturdier undergarments. Universal laws of physics must have been broken to allow such a squat creature to possess so much unrestrained boobage. I was afraid of her on sight and it only got worse when her personality began to reveal itself.
The Troll’s idea of a good work day was one in which she got to tell me, in explicit detail, all the ways we do things differently than she does them at the school where she normally drives people crazy. The implication is that she knows everything and everyone else is completely incompetent. All day long she would make unsolicited comments about literally EVERYTHING I did.

“Do you always put the bread out in a pan like that with tongs? Because WE always package each slice individually.” “Don’t you want me to put lids on all the fruit cups? No? Oh, well, WE put lids on them.” “WE keep all of our paper goods on the right side of the kitchen. You’ve got yours on the left. Would you like me to move them for you?” She took one look in our double industrial refrigerator and said, “Oh, no. No, this does NOT work at ALL!” and started rearranging things. I had to physically restrain her and steer her back to the un-lidded fruit cups she was supposed to be working on. She was so incredibly intrusive.

Imagine if one of your neighbors came over and tried to rearrange your underwear drawers. That’s what it was like having The Troll around.

At one point I was lifting a box of chicken nuggets into the freezer and she called out, “LIFT WITH YOUR LEGS! Don’t bend over like that; you’ll strain your back!” By that time I’d had more than enough of her unwanted advice. I told her that those of us who are more than three feet tall have little choice but to bend over in order to make contact with items on the floor. I muttered, “Unlike you, I am not able to approach a package of this size and embrace it face to face.” She yelled, “What? Oh, and don’t forget what I said about organizing your freezers by day of week!”

I muttered, “Don’t forget about locking your doors and windows tonight.”

The Troll is a horrible affliction to set loose upon an innocent Lunch Lady such as me. If she ever darkens my serving window again I will have no choice but to smash her bulky form into a milk crate and lock her in the cooler.

I am also the treasurer for the Parent-Teacher Organization from Hell. One of our committee chairs, Teri, finds it necessary to do her PTO shopping on a daily basis. She can’t go buy everything she’s going to need for, oh, say, the whole week, in one shopping trip. Thus, every single day there is an envelope taped to my front door with her receipts and demand for repayment. Teri is in charge of something called “Hospitality.” If it were possible to look up the word “hospitality” in the PTO dictionary it would be defined as such:

Hospitality. Hoss-pit-al-i-tee. To kiss ass by giving candy, gifts, luncheons and dorky notepads to a group of professional teachers whose annual income and benefits package greatly exceeds your own.


Teri spends PTO money like there’s no tomorrow and she does it everyday. I spend more of my treasurer time filling out her expense reports (they’re “too confusing” for her to do them herself) and driving checks over to her house than on any other PTO accounting activity. Initially I tried saving her receipts and writing her one check at the end of the week. She called me up and complained that this would cause her to lose some of the interest she earns on her checking account balance. (???)

What the heck kind of checking account has she got, and where can I get one just like it? From the way she tells it she must be some kind of checking account interest rate day-trader. Maybe she speculates in checking account hedge funds, or those lucrative checking account junk bonds. Perhaps she is shorting the checking account market using insider PTO information. For all we know she’s buying Hawaiian Punch options in advance of the big PTO Open House.

I wonder what the SEC would have to say about all this! Forget about Martha Stewart, we’ve got a possible white collar Hospitality crime to investigate at the local Junior High. I’d better get one of the math teachers to audit the PTO books before I get dragged into a financial scandal of Enron proportions.


Much Love,
--An Army Mom