There is a man behind the wall (and he is yelling)

So I know I've been MIA, and I don't have much of an excuse for it. (School started. Homework and work and writing are taking up my time! Oh, and I've spent a good amount of time watching all three seasons of Veronica Mars. But no excuses.) To make things worse, this post isn't going to have anything to do with writing. I could talk about how I'm having a very, very hard time finishing my stupid first draft, or I could write about the torture that is my snobby writing classes, or about how the first season of VM is the perfect example of what a story should be (the plotting, the dialogue, the characters, I'M DROOLING!), but instead you're getting this. I apologize in advance.

For those of you who don't know, I work in the journal department of a university press. We operate pretty separately from the university itself, except for the fact that we’re actually on campus, sharing a building with the continuing education department.

Usually this isn’t a problem, there are rarely students in the building and our little bank of cubicles is tucked into a usually quiet corner of the building, separate from the other offices and press departments.

But there is a classroom.

The only classroom that’s actually located in the building, actually, and we share a wall. My cubicle, wall, teacher standing at the chalkboard. (The below visual provided by me and my amateur Paint skills.) There used to even be a door connecting the room to our office area, but nobody used it so it was taken out last summer. It was thought that without the door maybe we wouldn’t be able to hear what was going on in the classroom. Nice thought. But oh so wrong.

Pretty, I know.

We can hear everything. It doesn’t help that this classroom has somehow become the designated classroom for foreign grad students. So not only can I hear every word being said, often times they are words I don’t even understand.

Most days I can block it out; I can tune out enough that the professor sounds more like the Charlie Brown teacher than anything. But today. Oh no, today the teacher is yelling.

YELLING!

He’s speaking English, but there’s a translator in there too. So he yells, then a quieter voice echoes him in Japanese. It’s hilarious in a way, but it’s getting old already.

So that's all I've got...my short tale of Yelling Man, the geography teacher from hell. I promise the posts will pick up in frequency and non-lameness forthwith.

(Oh one last thing. Did I mention he’s teaching American geography? He just finished a thrilling monologue on the different areas of the US. I give you the following as a word-for-word example of how my workday is going: “WE ARE IN THE MIDWEST RIGHT NOW! CHICAGO IS LIKE THE CAPITAL OF THE MIDWEST! THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN AREA IS THE LEAST POPULATED! IT IS MOSTLY MOUNTAINS AND DESERTS AND DOESN’T HAVE AS MANY PEOPLE! AND NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT BORDERS! AMERICA IS BORDERED BY CANADA AND MEXICO! A LOT OF PEOPLE IN MEXICO TRY AND GET INTO THE US…” I wish I was kidding.)

UPDATE: A coworker has complained about the yeller to the Powers That Be. She says, "Does he think that speaking louder means he won't need the translator?" So far, he is still yelling, but we've moved on to discussing the American political system...yikes.