Restroom Regs From Hell Some schoolhouse guerrilla in Chicago, apparently upset with the city school board’s tendency to write rules for every aspect of a teacher’s life, has been anonymously circulating an official-looking parody of a board memo, titled “Restroom Trip Policy For All Chicago Public School Teachers.’' The mock memo begins all too plausibly by saying a new Restroom Trip Policy (RTP) will be established to fight a marked increase in teacher abuse of restroom privileges. It soon sails off into the bureaucratic twilight zone, announcing, for example, a new Restroom Trip Bank and a Restroom Trip Card, which allows each employee 20 restroom visits per month. The memo generously notes that “unused restroom trip credits’’ (URTC) can be accumulated from month to month; the balance, however, may not exceed 30. To enforce all this, school restrooms will be equipped with Computer-Linked Voice Print Recognition. “If an employee’s restroom trip bank balance reaches zero,’' the memo states, “the doors to all restrooms will not unlock to that employee’s voice until the first day of the month.’' Furthermore, if a stall is occupied for more than three minutes, an alarm will sound. “Thirty seconds after the alarm sounds,’' the memo warns, “the toilet paper in the stall will retract, the toilet will flush, and the stall door will automatically spring open.’'
None Of The Above When Kevin Starr, an English teacher at Clarence (N.Y.) Central Senior High School, asked his students to write anonymous evaluations of the material they had covered, one wrote the following about linking verbs: “I think it’s really neat that a part of speech--is, was, were, am, etc.--is named the Lincoln verbs after one of our greatest presidents.’'
