Children come (to the gym for indefinite holding periods) first.

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Quandary: What should you do when it's August 23, you are a guidance counselor in a public school system, and 8,000 of the 41,000 high school students in your county still don't have class schedules?

Apparently, if you work for PGCPS, the answer is 'nothing at all.' Even if school starts on August 24. Chillax, baby!

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And then, when it's September 1, and the problem hasn't magically fixed itself over the course of several nights while you're at home watching Everybody Hates Chris -- give yourself the day off.

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And on September 2 -- leave work early. I don't mean 'early' like 4:00. School's over at 2:30, so go ahead and leave at noon. You're worth it. Who wouldn't agree that after waiting the entire summer to address a known problem that has prevented you from completing the most important part of your job -- which should have been done months ago, with or without "flaws in the new computer system --" and then making minimal progress over the course of almost two full weeks, that you've earned this time off?

And while we're on the subject -- what does 'new' really mean, anyway? Because SchoolMax, the demonized computer program you've been publicly blaming for the total exposure of your stunning incompetence, has been up and running for over a year. A year. I mean, is a one year-old still a newborn, then? I feel like we're not even speaking the same language.

And should you even bother to tell the teachers what's going on? Fuck, no! They're only the most important people in the school -- keep them on a need-to-know basis, because it's not like they need to know anything about, you know, students or classes. Continually stall them in the weeks before school with ambiguous half-answers and glaring omissions when they express concern over the obvious red flags popping up everywhere.

Remember all those times last year when you demanded they block out instructional time so you could come in and talk to their classes about various items of banal minutiae -- and then didn't show up at all? These people love surprises. Remember their looks of unadulterated joy when they walked into work on August 24 and gazed upon a sea of pissed off adolescents herded into the gym like cattle?

It was like Christmas for them. The only thing better was when you started putting 50 freshmen in 11th grade history classrooms with 35 desks just to get a few kids out of the gym. What the hell? I mean, they'd get to 11th grade eventually, right? Standing against cinderblock walls in poorly-ventilated rooms for 90 minutes at a time like Jews at Dachau will improve everyone's posture. And maybe they'll learn about that this year.