TEFLees in Spain

The office is very strange today.

It is strange partially because it is Natasha’s first day of official pregnancy leave. She is now at home incubating baby Jack.

It is also weird because we built teeny tiny rooms into the reception area of TtMadrid.In my mind, they were going to look similar to phone booths, and I wanted them to be red, which i think would be appropriate for an English school. However, if the lack of enthusiasm from other employees was any indication, it was doomed to be significantly less exciting than I had anticipated.

But I like that we’ve built teeny tiny rooms. TEFLees make a lot of noise when in one conglomerate space, and maybe dividing them into smaller portions will make them quieter. In other words, maybe they’ll be less inclined to yell across the room at each other if they can’t see each other. After spending 4 weeks in one place with the same people, TEFLees’ brains often start to turn to mush and they — like children under 18 months — cannot be expected to grasp object permanence.

Or maybe the mini-spaces will provide more ares for TEFLees to tell us secrets. Senida and I are both a bit overwhelmed by the personal information we’ve gotten lately — which is surprising since I don’t think either one of us are particularly empathetic people. I certainly wouldn’t choose us to confide to.

Another option which is consistent with our office’s habits is that we will use the stalls to hide food or stationary. We have an impressive amount of both hiding in our office. In case of hurricane or Basque seizure, we could eat and do coursework in our school for years.

I suppose the administrative reasoning behind this is more practical (and debatably less interesting). We have experienced and expect to experience substantial growth at work, and we need more rooms for classes, TEFLees, students, and employees.

When all else fails, we can build Jack a playpen in there maybe.