Several years ago I dated a girl that was a public school teacher in a middle school in inner-city Colosse. Her occupation was a plus on the general assessment as teaching is an admirable occupation. Though she didn’t particularly choose her school (when you’re doing on-the-job certification, your school is chosen for you) it was still a tough job that doesn’t get enough recognition. That was my thinking going in to it.

The scorn that she had for her students made itself apparent very quickly. I was understanding about it until she talked about how some days she would see how many students she could get to cry. There wasn’t another date after that. “Who,” I thought to myself, “gets pleasure out of making junior high school kids cry in class?”

Coming out of a convenience store at lunch, I saw a couple mothers coming out of the Laundromat right across from the convenience store. One of the little boys was fussing up a storm with an obnoxious little whine. My sympathy for the mother started to dwindle when she started mocking her kid’s whine. Then again, I don’t have any kids and I figured maybe that was the only thing that worked so maybe that was excusable. Then she threatened to put the kid (probably 8 years old or so) in his little sister’s babyseat. The kid started bawling.

Then the mother of the bawling child bragged to the other mother about what she had just accomplished.

Yessirree… getting an already whiney eight year old to cry. That’s sure something to be proud of, isn’t it? It was quite difficult to imagine any way at all in which that might be remotely helpful. But Mommy got to feel good about her temperamental superiority, which was apparently what was really important to her.

Ron Washington, my home city of Colosse’s most recent former mayor, was a police commissioner of Colosse and a handful of other cities before getting elected. When he was first elected in the late 90’s, I remember thinking it odd that he only had support of one of the city’s two police unions and that endorsement took a lot of behind-the-scenes work by a local state senator. The support that he did receive was tepid at best and they declined to support his re-election bid.

As it turned out, Washington was a startlingly poor mayor. When he was re-elected the only rationale his supporters could offer up was that he was too incompetent to be corrupt (which was true, though since he was term-limited out, a couple of his former aides are now in jail). I remember thinking at the time that you would think that cops would support a commissioner-candidate because his cop background would make him more likely to consider faults in the department (such as cop pay and resources) a priority. After became obvious what a bumbling fool Washington was, I figured that the union had some insight into the mayoral candidate that the rest of us lacked.

But I stumbled across something interesting the other day.

Mike Moakley is Colosse’s current commissioner and the article I ran across was on the site of a police union of Sierra City, where Moakley was chief before moving to Colosse. It was pointing out Colosse’s rising crime and how Moakley’s top priorities are not particularly aimed at correcting this problem (upping grooming requirements, cutting down on high speed chases). I found it odd that the Sierra City cop union would take up web space denouncing a former chief and not so subtly saying his new employer should push him out the door.

That got me thinking that often the people that worked under you, regardless of how well you performed, may actually be the least likely to support you once you are no longer their boss. I would be reluctant to vote for many, probably most, of the company heads I’ve worked for. You get to know them a little too well and you’ve often suffered for their mismanagement. This is probably particularly true for something like a police chief, whose job is not to support the police officers but rather the mayor.

Over at Bobvis, a conversation about college education turned into a conversation about creepy older guys at college that couldn’t get any action.

Though I don’t have any creepy old guy stories, I have a creepy young guy story.

I was nonetheless reminded of Honors Chemistry II, which I took my junior year in college. For whatever reason, my class of 15 had only three guys in it. I was actually the only male to show the first day and one of them actually dropped the course before ever showing up..

I had to admit, I liked the odds!

I was actually sort of dating someone at the time, but my putative girlfriend and I were on a not-so-subtle race to see who could lend out of the relationship more safely and quickly than the other. I set my sights pretty quickly on a cute, smiley young lady named Kara.

Kara had already been partnered up with the Other Guy, who hadn’t shown up the first labs (neither had the third guy, but he’d dropped the course apparently before ever showing up). She had been working with me and my partner, which was how I had been getting to know her. So I wasn’t sure what to expect except an irrational fear of competition that had been drilled into me by a confidence-sapping significant other that had been persistently framing every boy she knew as potential competition for the four months that we’d gotten to know one another.

Anyway, so the guy finally showed.

He was wearing gel in his hair, jewelry all over, a smug smile, and more sexual desperation than I had ever seen on anybody in my entire life. Never in my life had I seen someone that oozed sexual frustration out of every poor of his body. You know that guy who pretends to be cool, but when he does it only outlines how uncool he is? Think Michael Scott from The Office. Yeah, this guy was pretending, from the get go, that he had ever had sex in his short and obviously miserable life, which was only outlining how lonely and desperate he was.

I can’t even explain what about him gave me the impression that I got, but my lab partner and Kara had apparently been thinking the exact same thing. “I need to take a shower whenever I think about him,” Kara later told me.

In some respects, I ought to feel sorry for the guy. He was most likely born with unexceptional (though not necessarily ugly) appearances. He was probably born utterly devoid of a personality. But some people just kick off a certain gear in your head that says “this guy is unsafe.” I don’t even know what I would fear that he might do, if alone with a woman and something went awry, but prior to meeting him I didn’t know such pitiable miscreants existed.

I ended up dropping the class myself. My interest in Kara waned the more I got to know her. The girl I was seeing beat me in the race out of the relationship that we both detested.