The horror

There’s been plenty of comment over the years on this blog about bad jobs. Leader of Hamas, coach of Richmond etc.. But no matter what ‘job’ you’re getting shafted in you’re at least getting paid for it. I officially declare the worst unpaid role in the world to be..

Guest speaker at a school assembly.

Just think back to the sorts of shenanigans you used to pull during these things. We never cared that the woman talking up the front had just single handedly killed a tiger in the deepest African jungle - we just knew that it was a free hour when you didn’t have to pretend to be doing work and you’d treat it accordingly. If the ones you were subjected to were anything like mine there would have been a herding en masse into a school gymnasium where you’d be surrounded by a ring of teachers, most of whom you’d never seen before in your life, and subjected to some long winded wanky speech by the Principal/Co-Ordinator/other assorted stooge. Some other tossers - school captains and other assorted jerkoffs - would make a wanky speech or two and then they’d introduce the poor guest speaker.

It’s only now, four years out of high school, eight years out of a private school, that I feel sympathetic towards them. We were little shits - nobody was listening. If it was in the hour before lunchtime we were usually sitting at the back somewhere organising what the teams were going to be for our lunchtime sporting tilt (usually soccer - before it was fashionable and you’d get threatened with physical violence by bogans for daring to play it) and trying to keep the talking as low as possible to avoid the infamous scenes when teachers would bust you and pick one person to stand up and be moved somewhere else.

I’d also like to publically apologise (for the second time on here I think) to my Year 8 French teacher. We were little shits and she clearly wasn’t cut out for it. In retrospect I would have gone her something shocking. Anyway..

One of the great moments in the history of school assemblies,

The venue: The hall of the Melbourne University’s pissy little campus on Auburn Rd, Hawthorn
The year: 1997
The guest speakers: Rohan Connolly (the footy writer guy from the Age) and some champion classical pianist

Traditionally we weren’t taking any notice of what was going on. Connolly was an obvious attempt to engage the kiddies by dragging in the biggest sporting name they could find. Sadly what the Anglo Principal, Anglo Vice-Principal and set of Anglo Level Coordinators obviously didn’t compute was that 75% of the school population were of the hairy Mario variety. Including the chicks. And that nobody gave a shit. He got booed loudly when he started crapping on about Essendon - I remember that. And he never mentioned Melbourne once which probably had something to do with the fact that we (they? I only went to one game in 1996-97. Against Carlton in ‘97 when we won) were the shittest team going around. Stupid AFL having to murder Fitzroy to get their love children Port Adelaide in the league..

The memorable moments kicked off in earnest when the pianist showed up. Apart from the traditional ripple of laughter across the room when the word ‘pianist’ was used her performance started casually enough. She didn’t even bother giving speech. It was then that the guy sitting three seats down from me who had been enthusiastically playing a Game Boy for the duration of the assembly yelled out, no really yelled, “THAT’S THE MUSIC FROM FAT ALBERT!” Naturally I absolutely died when I heard that. It was a full scale tears down the face job. In fact I hadn’t even regained my composure when the door at the back of the hall flew open and some chick ran in, shouted “YOU HIT MY SISTER” and started punching the fuck out of some bimbo at the back of the room.

To her credit the pianist just played on. If she’d suddenly switched to playing “Eye of the Tiger” instead I would have declared her the greatest musician the world has ever seen.

What a morning. The phrase “You hit my sister” was officially entered into history that day.