Today counts as my shortest day of work ever. Sort of.

Because we are in the pass back phase of exam season, I originally had little reason to go to the office today and, in fact, had planned to work from home (more on that later).

Then, suddenly, yesterday, lots of reasons to come in today found me. First, junior high school marks were due today which meant I finished marking my exams “yesterday” (at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) and had to enter final marks in the computer today.

Then, yesterday, I got a text from one of my colleagues telling me that the make-up exam assignment was also due today. Basically, at the school where I work, if a student fails, he is “required” to take a make-up exam which, if he passes and/or bothers to show up (“required” means different things in different cultures apparently) he can get a passing grade. Also, if a student gets a near-failing grade, he has the option of taking the exam to improve his score to a not as near-failing grade. The exams can be either take home writing assignments or sit-down exams. In this case, I planned to assigned long essays and then read them at my leisure when and if they arrived on my desk.

Of course the assignment was due at 8:20 a.m. This meant I had to trudge into work as if I actually was going to work. (The school has not yet discovered an effective way to use the resources of the internet in situations like this.) I got to work at my usual time (7:50 a.m.), entered marks in the computer and filled out the proper forms for the make-up exam and then found the proper teacher and passed the assignment off.

That was all finished by 8:15.

As I’ve written before, I work at the school not for the school, which means if there are no classes I usually don’t have to be there.  Still, I felt kind of guilty being the first person to leave when not everyone had yet arrived. I meandered around a bit pretending I had something to do.  That lasted only a few minutes, though, and I left school at 8:30, which is ten minutes before classes started.

However, although I was not at the place where I’m assigned to work, I was responsible for filling the time with work related activities, which I totally did. Totally. I worked up next year’s calendars and started thinking about how I’m going to fill the days at the end of next week when I’m not working but am responsible for working.