Brand New School: Making Friends!

I got to school a bit early for the first lab seesion and sat around eavesdropping on my classmates. Most are early-20s women; plus a couple of old ladies (okay 40 or so), a few dudes, and a tranny type. One girl announced that she already had a BA, from the private and very expensive Big Ole City University, where I also got mine. The difference is that I won't be telling that to anyone. One of the ladies, who I am assuming based on her therapist-style reading glasses is a know-it-all, was explaining how cutthroat the corporate working environment is. I found it interesting that although nurses are not supposed to have criminal records, both of the old ladies had apparently broken into my TV and stolen Candy Finnigan-from-A&E's-Intervention/my mom's haircut. Weird.

At first, everyone hated our teacher because she is about 100 years old, speaks with a thick Eastern European accent I'm only used to hearing from a bikini waxer, and is a low-talker. This is, in a lab setting, somewhat unbearable. She starts by telling us we should all go to tutoring so we can keep up with the class. The Wedding Planner, sitting behind me, sassily lets it be known that she will be in tutoring Mondays and Wednesdays starting next week. Because I have a rare hearing disorder that causes me to think such things could only be said in sarcasm, I reply that I will be in tutoring every day and will quit my job so I have more time to spend at the tutor center. Later, when she lets her lab partners know that she can be found in the tutoring center a few days a week, I realize on some level (though I still can't intellectually process it) that she might have been serious.

As class goes on, Teach has us go around and take turns reading safety rules out loud. When it comes to the no food and drink edict, she shares a tale/urban legend of a coworker who brought in a milkshake that someone else mistook for a chemical waste receptacle, and obviously he's permanently damaged [cue that one-armed guy from Arrested Develoment: "And that's why you never bring drinks into chem lab!"]. Professor goes on to remind us that other people in the room might not like us and could poison us if we bring in beverages. And with that, she's won over the room and everybody loves her.

It easy-going from there on out. She tries to explain scientific notation, my lab partners break out calculators to convert liters to milliliters, and I knock out my homework in about one little-fill-in-box' time. Oh, and my cubemate asks where I'm from, claiming she can hear the nonexistant midwestern accent that I didn't even have when I moved to Big Ole City 13 gd years ago. I would be offended, but I try to think strategically: These real students will probably be working nurses before I've even finished my snail's-pace prerequisities, which means if I knock out their lab work for them, maybe they'll write me a letter of recommendation in two years. Holla.