Melissa was excruciatingly bored as she looked out at her eighth period Algebra class. It was her first year working at a private school after six years working at the wildly underfunded city school district that was only a 15 minute drive from where she sat, but may as well have been on another continent.
Her morning walk had been through metal detectors, but now was past organic tomato and Brussel Sprout beds that where fertilized by compost created by the student run "Environmental Team."
While at first having nearly 100% attendance at each class and having multiple students offer to answer each question had been exciting, Melissa soon grew bored. She could have walked into the room threw the text book on the floor and gone to sleep and these future Ivy Leaguers would be fine. Even the ones that weren't that smart had parents who would make whatever "donation" was needed to make it happen. After teaching this class for six year previously she even had all her lesson plans done for pretty much the whole year.
This new job also afforded her the opportunity to live without a roommate for the first time, which at first had been great. No one else's mess around, quiet whenever she wanted it, those first few weeks had been glorious. It didn't take long though to start hating those exact things. Melissa didn't have a ton of friends, and she wasn't that aggressive in her dating life. It became so easy for her to leave work without having talked to many other adults, then come home and talk to no one, then do it all over again the next day.
Melissa had quit trying to get to know her fellow faculty members soon after arrival. Most of them had been here for many years, and they actually thought they had hard jobs. She could not bear to listen to them complain about meeting all the "diverse needs" of their students. I mean, dear god, some of the students this year had asked for less homework!
Thankfully ninth period was her free class, and then she just had to manage her "extra activity" before she could call it a day. Extra activity was just way to assure each student had plenty of extracurricular garbage to fill out those precious college applications. She was also expected to write a glowing recommendation for each student in her group.
Once the bell range and all her students politely filed from the room Melissa was free to read "her stories". She liked thinking of them that way because of the way her mother used to call the soaps she watched that, and it made her giggle to compare her mother's love of those ridiculous old shows to her enjoyment of the dirty adventures the characters she would read about would get involved in. Melissa closed the door and found a new chapter from one from one of her favorite authors. It was about a college freshman trying to pay her tuition in an unusual way.
She was about half way through when she heard a knock on her door. Annoyed, she closed the window on her computer and said "Come in."
The young IT guy walked in, looking a bit tentative. He was also new; Melissa had met him at this summer's new staff orientation. He was tall, a former college swimmer who clearly kept himself in shape. She thought his name was Pierce.
"Hi" Melissa started after it appeared he wasn't going to explain what he was doing here. "Can I help you?" Melissa was able to glance at his staff ID, she was happy that she was right about his name.
"Ummmm Hi Ms. Jones, I umm, I'm Pierce I'm the new IT guy" Melissa didn't understand why he was being weird, he had seemed pretty confident this summer.
"Ya I remember meeting you at the new staff event in August, what can I do for you?" Melissa wanted to get this over with.
"Well, I ummmm, part of my job is to monitor internet usage and ummmm there is kind of a problem coming from your room."
"I doubt it, I teach math and I never have the students on computers, sorry" Melissa wished he would get out.
"Ummm well it's ahhh from your account. The log shows that you have visited a pornographic website multiple times. At first I thought it might just be a mis-click so I ignored it but I kind of need you to know I can see whatever you do online here."
Melissa's heart sank. How could she be so stupid? At her last school the computers were so old she had used her own laptop for work, and the IT department was so overwhelmed that on the days the internet worked it was simply an open connection that anyone could connect anything to. She had gotten used to that freedom and hadn't even considered someone was paying attention to such things here.
"Oh my god, I uhh I'm so sorry, I just ummmm" Melissa felt like she was drowning.