BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE...

Why is it at times that the easy something seems it ends up being incredibly difficult? Oh I’m not saying it is like that in every case, just too often in the ones that you honestly didn’t expect it because it was such a minor issue.

I hope I’m not being too vague here, but it is hard all the time to come up with an example that doesn’t lend itself to um, shall we say, incrimination. So let me do what I can to think of an instance that I figure it would be safe to mention for the sake of this posting.

I guess in this instance the best example I can think of is when I had to go for parent/teacher night at my son’s school. Rash, junior is not exactly the most outstanding of students. Okay I’ll be honest is has managed to inherit all my bad qualities and is apparently proud of the fact. Only since he is still inexperienced at what makes a good con there are the occasions when he blunders and manages to get caught.

However the school in their infinite wisdom elected to not contact me when they found out for example that he was running a betting parlor in the furnace room. Instead they decided to wait till parent/teacher night to bless me with the news.

Here I am innocently tooling off for the conference and thinking that this is going to be a little affair, nothing major or any type of big trouble. Then I get there and all of sudden the teacher decides to regale me with all the fabulous laws my son has managed to break while attending the school. Was I happy? Not hardly.

I did manage to cope, which was complicated by the fact that his one teacher does speak in a rather loud voice by habit and succeeded in sharing my son’s exploits at a volume that was overhead by some other parents. That was not exactly my proudest moment, let me tell you.

When I got home my son and I had a nice little chat about his behavior. I suppose I ought to have play the dad more and given him one of those fatherly lectures regarding the deficiencies in his behavior. That is what I promise his teacher I would do.

I guess it shouldn’t have been a problem for me to do that. But you know it was. The thing is I’ve never had any trouble playing the hypocrite. So that wasn’t the problem.

What I did though was to model my lecture after one I received from my father when I ended up being guilty in high school of similar misdeeds. It had worked for me so I thought it would work for him too.

My approach was to attempt to reason with him with a few pointers on how to refine his act to avoid getting caught. You know pass on the benefit of my own experience in hopes he would avoid future instances of getting caught.

I thought my speech was great. And he did listen. So I labored under the delusion that my effort had been a success. That was until the next parent/teacher’s meeting. It is the one where I was informed by his scheme to blackmail his teacher with some compromising photos he managed to obtain. I guess I didn’t cover the in finer points of blackmail with them. So it is back to the drawing board for me and hopefully a second father/son chat that helps to guide him out of the place where he risks being caught!