So glad it's finally March!

This year’s Spring Career Fair was the most emotionally draining one ever. Fortunately, we had rented an electric scooter for me to buzz around the gym with, so I didn’t have to stand all day. That helped my knee considerably. Irene, the secretary who helps me with the Fair, found a place that rented them for $50 a day. When they heard we wanted it delivered downtown, they said Oh, we’re going to charge you a month’s rental for that. So I said good, give me the scooter for the whole month then. Bernie, the secretary whose electric scooter is broken, can use it until hers is fixed.

Anyway, I think I have to find another way to do these fairs, and spread the work around a little. I kept forgetting things during the weeks leading up to the fair. For instance, there were some banners that should have gone up a week ahead of time, and I finally asked someone to put them up two days before the fair. She started to give me attitude instead of help, and I lost it! I was holding part of the stand that the banners hang from and I threw it to the floor and said, “Jeez!” and went off to find someone else. I haven’t been that frustrated in several years.

Weird things happened during this fair that I’d never seen before.

There was a woman who came up to me with a problem. She had lost all her resumes in a snow bank because of the wind and snow outside. She said she had given one to a hospital, since she was going into the OT program, but they said they weren’t hiring people at her level. She left and came back saying that she wanted them to return the resume to her, but they insisted they didn’t have it. So I went over and they let me look through the resumes and it wasn’t there. I felt kind of funny doing it, but I thought it was worth a try.

The woman was waiting for me around the corner. I told her it wasn’t there and then gave her a way to spin this to her advantage: she could tell employers that she was updating her resume and it wasn’t ready yet, and could she send it later? That way she could collect business cards and then tailor her resume specifically for the different companies. Her resume would arrive by itself instead of in a big pile from the fair, and thus would get more attention.

She seemed pleased with this and went off again. Later, I saw her loitering around the lobby, not so obviously, but still obviously waiting for me. She thanked me for the idea and said it worked pretty well. Then she went on to explain why she was so upset about losing the resume. It seems she had been a victim of identity theft a couple of years ago. Someone she knew slightly had charged thousands of dollars to credit cards in her name. It was a nightmare trying to get it all straightened out. So, understandably, she was concerned about her employment history floating around out there.

In the afternoon, a woman fainted and collapsed to the floor. Someone called 911 and no fewer than twelve people from various safety forces showed up: they came from the Cleveland State police, the Cleveland Police Department and the Cleveland Fire Department. The woman did say that she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything all day, and that probably contributed to her fainting. They wheeled out in a wheelchair and that was that.

All during the fair, people kept asking me where Pfizer and Eli Lilly were, and I knew they hadn’t registered. Saturday morning I went back and started looking at some of the problems and realized that the computer system we use had generated some highly inaccurate lists that we then printed up and distributed, thinking that they were just fine. It turns out that they were wildly random.

I haven’t looked at the evaluations yet, though one employer felt he just had to scan and email his evaluation to me right away. He complained that there was no one to help him unload his stuff. I know I had four or five students out there, so I wonder when he arrived. He may have come later and missed them. I wonder what other nuggets I’ll find in the rest of the papers.

If you want to know what’s going on in school, we have learned that you cannot ask Max directly. “How was school?” is not likely to elicit a news-filled answer. So, I asked him what happens if you get tired at school. He answered by saying, “Can’t put your head down! It’s bad to put your head down.” Even more emphatically, he said, “Just keep on goin’” .Friday night he decided that wrestling was on the agenda. We rolled around the living room floor, first he would pin me and then I would pin him. Finally he said, “Best five out of twelve!” We had to continue after dinner, though. He invited me upstairs to play with Lincoln Logs, so we made some ingenious houses which he gleefully destroyed. Then we turned to Legos and he instructed me to build a “mega suit”, whatever that is. We grabbed random pieces and built contraptions and then competed to see whose invention could do more things. Mine could fly, roll and fall down. On the other hand, his could fly left, right, backwards and forwards, “save lives” and had “crystal power”. He won because his turned out to be more versatile. On Saturday night there was a potato chip can on the steps. Max was going up to bed and he looked longingly at the can. Shane it would be OK if he had a chip, and when Max opened the can, those springy snakes shot out! They got me good. He delighted in pulling that trick over and over.

On Saturday night Kathy and I met her sisters and their husbands for a birthday dinner for one sister at a restaurant that had gone out of business years ago and recently reopened. The food was great and the portions were huge. Too many times places charge a bunch for too little, but not this place.

I’m taking a few days off this week to recover: Monday and then Thursday and Friday. That way I don’t have to work on my birthday. I am so glad February is over. It sure seemed like a long month.