YB Disasters, Smackdown Meltdown & Goat Heads

I tried to tell my yearbook staff that it’s just never a good sign when your adviser has to make a folder that says, “YB Disasters & Other Emergencies.” (BTW, that YB stands for Yearbook for those of you not in the biz.)

About half of the YB staffers looked at me with those deer-in-the-headlight-kind-of-eyes. The other half, well, they just pretended to ignore me. (OK OK OK, so perhaps they weren’t pretending.) Nonetheless, now I have a folder with huge blue letters that says “YB Disasters & Other Emergencies,” and no amount of Emergency Chocolate is going to make me feel any better about that. (I know because my yearbook editor and I ate an entire chocolate bar that was even emblazoned with the words EMERGENCY CHOCOLATE.)

I’m not very happy about that either. That as in the fact that the tasty chocolate bar is now gone, and that as in the fact that the disasters remain. Now I won’t bore you with all the details because, after all, my parents taught me if you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all. But let’s just say the root of my angst starts with a photography company. And let’s just say that right about now, all across this great land of ours, I can hear advisers--the short, the fat, the tall--all shouting, “Amen, sister!”

Despite my new not-so-nifty folder, the absence of my cute little Emergency Chocolate Bar and an overwhelming urge to join the WWE to smackdown a few somebodies, three rather amusing things did happen this week. Let’s call them…

Richie’s 3 Amusing Incidents
That Stopped Her Smackdown Meltdown

Incident #1…While all the haranguing was going on with the yearbook staff, one of the new tech guys was in the room busily uploading some new software and trying to make himself invisible. I can’t remember exactly what transpired, but it was typical deadline stuff--bantering back and forth, fingerpointing and blah blah blah I’m-more-stressed-than-you blah blah blah you-stress-me-out blah blah blah.

That’s when the new tech guy piped in, “I’m getting stressed just standing here…”

We all stopped quicker than an InDesign program crashing, just looked at him and laughed.

Obviously, he never experienced a newspaper or yearbook deadline.


Incident #2…I was duly performing my hall duty between classes with my hall monitoring compadres when one of my students ran up to us and asked, “Can I go the restroom?”

“Go ahead,” I answered.

“What did she say?” he asked my hall monitoring compadre.

“Hey, she didn’t call you a Goat Head! She said, ‘Go Ahead,’” my compadre answered.


Incident #3…I’ve decided to try a bit of yoga, so I asked Mikey the extraordinaire to please look in the library for some yoga DVDs for me. The next day, Mikey duly reported his findings…

“Ahhhhhh, Ms. Richtsmeier…” he stammered, “I was, ah, looking for those, you know, yoga DVDs…”

“Yeah,” I said, “did you find any?”

“Well, we have a problem… one has been out a while and is probably lost…” he said, sounding just a tad bit uncomfortable.

“Problem? As in what?” I asked.

“Well, the only other one, was… Well, it was called, ‘Big Yoga,’ and I went to look at it, and it said it was for people who were afraid to try yoga because of their size and age… and I, well, I didn’t want you to think that I…that we… think you’re old… or fat… or nothin’…because it was a yoga DVD for old, fat women…really we don’t think you’re fat…so I…ah…didn’t get it because, you know, you’re not old… or fat… or…”

Great, I thought.

I just ate a gajillion calorie chocolate bar.

I turn 52 this month.

Maybe I should goat head go ahead and get that Big Yoga DVD after all.