Impromptu lunchime quizzes

When I started compiling quizzes in the mid-late 90s I would take them into the staff room at the school and road test them on a colleague at lunch time. Before too long more and more of my colleagues started joining in, and it grew to the stage that it wasn’t uncommon for them to ask me when I was doing a quiz next. It become the kind of little mini event that made life just that little bit more enjoyable. I miss that staff room and I miss those days.

It kind of died the death, what with people moving on and times changing and it certainly wouldn’t have worked in the new school when we were amalgamated in 2016. There was a staff room but it was in the other block and as a result most people stayed in their area’s workrooms at break and lunch. Also we were three separate staffs combined into one, and we didn’t all know each other well enough.

Come last year, and when I turned 60 and qualified for my full teacher’s pension I took it, making a Dave shaped hole in the door as I got out as fast as my short fat hairy legs would carry me. But this wasn’t the end of my working life. I didn’t want my experience of the working world to end the way that my teaching career had. My few months on the sick from March to the end of August convinced me that I wasn’t ready for retirement from any work just yet. So I decided to try to put the admin skills that I’d acquired in nearly forty years of the day job to work for me and applied for a number of jobs. I had a couple of counts against me, namely my age, and the fact that I was overqualified and yet underexperienced. I took a temporary post with NHS dental services in the Swansea Bay University Health Board, on the reasoning that a) it would give me a bit of breathing space to find something else – and b) it might be easier to find a permanent position from within. Which is exactly what happened.

I think that I’ve shed a huge amount of baggage I was carrying in the school, and I’m pretty much living in the moment now. Trust me, it’s a very nice place to spend some time. I really like the team in the Dental Referral Management Centre with whom I’m working and wonder of wonders, they seem to like me as well. Sonia, a propos of nothing, said on Monday that she had a little prezzie for me. They know all about the Mastermind thing – come on, I’m never going to keep that quiet. Sonia saw a quiz book in a charity shop over the weekend, and bought it for me. She gave it to me on Monday and we had a little quiz session with it. And, I gotta be honest, it brought back to me just how much I used to enjoy those staff room sessions. Will we do it again? I think I need to pick my moment, but it would be great if we did.