R&S

I hate writing about serious things, you know?

It seems to me if I have to be inflicted with sobering thoughts I shouldn't have to inflict it on my blog.

But it's time to write about this, methinks.

Now, what is R&S? It stands Record & Statistics. It's been around for sometime among the prefect board, but they only started taking it seriously when I was in Form 3. Basically, we record all the wrongdoings - ponteng cases and so on - that the teachers record in the daily discipline book. Trust me, there are a lot of cases a day, just in case you were wondering. We hold on to all the student's discipline files and the name lists and so on.

If you're a R&S prefect, it doesn't affect you much. You probably only duty about one recess a week in the little small room next to the office.

But if you're an R&S Officer, you might as well kiss your normal prefect duty goodbye. Recording all the wrongdoings in our school isn't something you can put off - they just pile up. Besides which, the discipline file in your class doesn't just magically get updated by itself, you know.

Last year, I was appointed R&S Officer 2.

I didn't take it well. I was upset, and very. Hearing it confirmed was like having to swallow a bitter pill I was being forced to take. I went home and had a fit, I screamed at my parents, I was pretty much miserable. I still remember it being late at night, with the whole house in bed, when I carefully unbolted the front door and crept out to the swing in my garden to sit out there and sob whole-heartedly. I had to be brought back into the house by my father, and even then I was still crying.

Yes, it may all sound very melodramatic, but that's what I did.

Surely you can see my logic. Being a prefect has been in my blood since forever, I've never really had to think about it. I'm not saying that I'm a freakin' good one, I'm just saying that, I am a prefect, not a clerk with no pay. It didn't make sense to me, you know? What was the point of my obeying all the school rules specifically, since I wasn't even playing a part in enforcing them anyway? Why did I stay back on Thursdays to hear how to better handle students and act as a prefect, when all I did was sit in some smelly room and die over paperwork? Why waste money on going to camps to teach me how to lead students, when all I led was a pen pressed onto paper that I hated?

I adapted, though. Tharini helped. She was happy with her post as R&S 1, she liked doing what we were doing. As we got closer, R&S seemed less like a chore and more like forty minutes of gossip with a friend. Somehow, being in charge over some minions lessened the sting of my being stuck there twice a day, five days a week. I instilled a sense of laziness in myself, a don't-care-about-prefects-ish-ness, that I'd never felt before. I revelled in slacking in our own room, under the fan.

Now I'm happy to have take the torch from my predecessor Tharini, and you're looking at the next R&S Officer 1, here, with darling Kalia by my side.

And it all but cuts when someone asks me about R&S.