THE RUBBER ROOM By Hugo Hanriot After waking up from his frequents naps in the “rubber room”, Douglas escaped his boredom by reflecting about his former life. His thoughts always traveled back to his college years, 42 years ago, when then his main concern was to find a job after graduation that would provide him with a safe nest for life. He understood that jobs like that required creativity, dedication, leadership and higher education, or just plain luck. He lacked all of them. So, what type of work should he look for? After evaluating his situation, he decided on teaching. He had heard the teachers’ union was powerful, successfully protecting its members’ jobs, salaries and benefits. That was vital to ease his deep insecurities. As a student he had good teachers, driven by a missionary vocation. They motivated in their students the desire for learning, while challenging and keeping them focused. He could never become one of them. He had mediocre teachers, too. New York City School System was huge enough to accommodate every one of them. With his degree in liberal arts – which he barely achieved – he went for additional credits to qualify as a typing teacher. He felt lucky by his choice; typing teachers didn’t have to keep up to date with the ever changing social, scientific and technological changes of the world. As a typing teacher he could use his material year after year with very few changes. A couple months after completing the extra teaching college credits, he was interviewed, tested and hired by the New York City Department of Education. Douglas remembered vividly his early teaching years. He had wisely structured his classes in a way that required minimum participation from him. He would open the classes with a brief instruction, and then assign his students to type various pages from their text books. “Practice, practice, practice,” he would encourage the class as he returned to his desk to attend to his own personal matters. In those days he was looking to rent a studio apartment near his school. Ignoring his students, he would open the real estate page of his newspaper and look through the ads for rentals. He was at that time living in a small room that looked more like a closet. He shared the bathroom and kitchen with its owners. He felt uncomfortable with the set up, but it was the only place he could afford before getting his teaching position. On one of his calls, he talked with a realtor that convinced him, instead of renting, to buy a house. “You have a safe job. Why don’t you go to the teachers’ credit union and ask for a loan to cover the down payment for the house? Afterwards I’ll put you in contact with a mortgage agent to get you a loan.” “I’m new at the school. My salary isn’t high enough to make monthly payments for two loans,” Douglas discarded the idea. “I just listed a large house with four bedrooms. You could rent three of them to cover the loan payments, and live rent free in the other bedroom.” After buying his first house, encouraged by the realtor, he kept acquiring rental properties. Forty two years later, while confined at the “rubber room”, he owned a real estate portfolio worth six million dollars. Douglas had landed in the “rubber room” after 30 years of classroom teaching. The “rubber room”, formally called “Temporary Reassignment Center”, was the destination for teachers accused of incompetence or wrongdoing. The teacher union had made sure that their members in the rubber room, in spite of facing dismissal, received their full salary. The waiting for the Department of Education, or a hearing officer to decide the teacher’s fate could take years. In Douglas’ case, he had been in the rubber room for ten years. The Department of Education had paid him during that time $80,000 a year for doing nothing! The rubber room conceived as a punishment place didn’t have rubber walls as its name implied. The name originated from the idea that it was hard not to get wacky in it and finish up banging your head against its walls. After spending day after day in that windowless room, painted white, and furnished with empty folding tables and hard chairs, it was easy to go crazy. It would have been more appropriate to call it the “torture cell”. Douglas was there due to having been accused of making lewd comments and ogling ninth-grade girl butts in his class. During his trial, Douglas’ lawyer asked the district for the attendance records of that day of the students accusing his client. Luckily for Douglas, his school had lost them. As a result, he was neither found guilty nor innocent. The teachers union and the district agreed to keep him in the rubber room until his retirement, which, at his age, he already qualified for. Douglas didn’t show any interest in retiring. Why should he? His pension grew $1,700 extra for each additional year in the rubber room. Besides, New York City didn’t have a mandatory retirement age for teachers; he could stay there forever. He had also become fond of the idleness; he used it for his siestas, remembering past times, and making phone calls from his cell phone to manage his properties. Contrary to Douglas’ relaxed demeanor, the confined space, boredom, and the anxiety of other occupants in the rubber room about losing their jobs produced frequent conflicts among them. “Hey, old man, why don’t you retire and take your stupid smile some place else?” a young teacher in the room confronted him out of no reason. A middle-aged woman immediately jumped in against Douglas, “You S.O.B. are driving all of us crazy with your phone calls. We are all facing the loss of our livelihood while you’re bragging richness with your stupid calls. Give me your phone!” The woman tried to grab Douglas’ cell phone. They pushed and wrestled until Douglas fell to the floor. He was taken out of the room on a gurney and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. He left behind his real estate fortune and no family member to claim it. His properties were declared abandoned, and turned over to the State Unclaimed Property Office. They sold them and gave the money to the U.S. Department of Treasury. It was the only occasion in Douglas’s life that he contributed in a meaningful way to society. I’ll see you next week with a new story. TO READ MORE OF HUGO’S STORIES GO TO amazon/author/hugohanriot TO GET OUR NEWSLETTER VIA E-MAIL FEATURING OUR WEEKLY FREE NEW STORY, GO TO THE RIGHT HAND COLUMN OF STORIES4REAL.COM AND USE THE “REGISTER” OR “SUBSCRIBE” BUTTON. TO SEND A COMMENT ABOUT THIS STORY VISIT facebook and search for Hugo Hanriot
Posted on: Sat, 22 Jun 2013 16:49:48 +0000
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