RoboNomics

Chapter 3 - 2016

I barely step into the staff room when Mr. Cabrera calls to me from across the room. 

"So what's it like?" 

He sits at a table filled with round-faced older teachers. They all gaze at me, expectant. I just want to get my lunch bag and get out. 

I focus on the water damage that's spread across the acoustic ceiling tiles like a giant coffee stain on paper. 

"I didn't think it would look so real." 

I inch towards the kitchen entrance at the back of the room.

"Don't worry, dear," Mrs. Jones, a pudgy teacher close to retirement, calls from another table. "It can't last."

"Thanks." 

I hustle into the galley kitchen. I make my way to the ancient brown fridge at the end of the room. I find my pink tartan lunch bag lined up neatly next to Henri's blue and yellow tartan one. 

Henri is my best friend at Crescent Street Public. We bought the two bags together once as a lark. 

"So we'll always stand out at school," Henri said about them. "The two weirdos of the school, bound together by weird lunch bags." 

Now they sit between moldering yogurts, trays of weekly goodie exchange cookies, and grimy bits of leftovers.

I don't know enough about my coworkers to understand why they isolate Henri. I would like to think the best of them. I would like to assume that it's not because he's happily married to a man but because of his blunt manner of delivering uncomfortable truths. 

But I can't know for sure. When it comes to my isolation, however, I know the reasons why the other teachers don't socialize with me. And those reasons have nothing to do with them.

I've never really hung around the staff room. For the last three years, the school has had a yard duty bot and we teachers are completely free at recess and lunch. It was the first bot that came into the school. 

I'd thought at the time that a bot could never do what a teacher did, not for children, not in the classroom. I thought that my job required a human mind, not a dumb machine.

So when I no longer had to trudge outside in snow and on ice anymore, I was happy to settle into a routine of eating in my classroom. Lunch and recess were precious times to get caught up on work. It was an ideal situation. 

The few times I ventured into the teacher lounge, I'd been bored by the talk of university bound children and retirement plans. I was still at the beginning of my career, thinking too much about my work to care about quotidian concerns. 

I didn't have much to say to the other teachers. But there was one exception. When I close the fridge and turn around, he's materialized.

"Whoa, you startled me," I say. 

Although Henri is lean, the kitchen is barely big enough to fit the two of us comfortably. He looks down at me through his tiny square glasses.

"So, what's the machine like?"

"I really don't want to talk about it."

"It's stupid. It won't last long. Replacing teachers with machines? Come on."

"Well the kids like it, anyways."

He stares at the ground. Sighs. 

"Did they say anything to you?" He nods towards the staff room.

"Just the expected garbage."

"No, not the teachers...so predictable." He rolls his eyes. "The principal. What's next?"