You Have an App for That?

Recently after school one day I came upon a student unrolling a roll of toilet paper. Fortunately, the toilet paper was not real. He was actually unrolling a pretend roll of toilet paper on his IPod while other students watched. Curious, I opted to investigate.

“What are you doing?” I asked, uncertain if I actually wanted to know.

“Unrolling toilet paper,” he muttered, his voice full of that precious adolescent inflection that reminded me I was very stupid.

“Hmmm,” I continued, deciding it was time to bring out a bit of my trademark hipness. “Does your IPhone come with that app?”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s not an IPhone. It’s an IPod. You think my parents would let me have an IPhone?”

“Do they know what you’re doing with your IPod?”

He shrugged and another student, a member of his audience, chimed in. “You download it for free. My best time is five seconds.”

“Is that good?” I asked.

“Uh, yeah.”

“No, it’s not. That sucks. I’ve done three seconds before.”

“Yeah, right!”

“Watch me!”

Leaving them to their intense fake toilet paper debate, I retreated to collect my own thoughts. What is worse, I considered. That such a download exists; that an actual person was probably paid actual money to design this application? That a fourteen-year-old would use valuable time to unroll pretend toilet paper? Or that his peers would waste their own time to watch the fake toilet paper be unrolled?

Who knows? Life is full of such questions, and a junior high school, which is where I spend about forty-five hours a week, is full of a disproportionate amount. What I do know, believe it or not, is that this experience may have saved Illinois from certain financial ruin. Reflecting on this lad’s intense devotion to his fake toilet paper amusement, an idea hijacked my brain in the form of these four words: Fantasy Farming Online Gaming.

I propose that we use technology, along with two of Illinois’ most precious vices—farming and gambling—to save our terrible, terrible economy. Fantasy Farming will operate like this: At the beginning of each farming season, participants will “purchase” an Illinois farmer for a reasonable sum of money, via a lottery system. Once the gamers know what farmer they have acquired for the year, they will have exactly two weeks to research their hero online, either from their personal computer or their overly expensive hand-held device. They will uncover vital statistics about their farmer, such as his total acres planted, his seed and pesticide and herbicide choices, along with his preferred brand of smokeless tobacco. With this information, coupled with the gamer’s knowledge of weather predictions and soil quality, the fantasy farmer will predict how many total bushels—soybeans, corn, whatever—the real farmer will harvest by the end of November. The closest three fantasy farmers will win a considerable monetary prize based on their accuracy, with the remaining money going into the state’s dismal coffers.

Now, some may ask, “What if there are more fantasy farmers than real farmers?” Well, for financial reasons, hopefully there will be, but no matter. Fantasy farmers can share real farmers. Providing the two gamers have different bushel predictions, it would not be a big deal.

“What if a real farmer goes into cahoots with the fantasy farmer and ‘cooks the books’ so to speak, manipulating the numbers or even modifying their actual harvest to help a particular gamer win?” This, again, would be a non-issue and would actually reinforce another great Illinois pastime: nauseating graft.

“What if disaster strikes?” Some may wonder. “What if we have a stormy spring, for example, that messes up everyone’s predictions? A Kansas Scenario, if you will, named after that state’s reputation as a tornado magnet and also on account of their recent NCAA tournament performance.” Again, who cares? Farming is a risky business, and Fantasy Farming will be, too. We’re 14 billions dollars in debt, so, you know, we’re kind of running out of options. If you have a better idea, by all means, write to Springfield and see what happens. I’m sticking with this. The goal, folks, is to generate revenue, not provide citizens with a fun, harmless diversion. That's what river boats are for.

Granted, it’s probably too late in the season to enact my idea for this farming season. As they say in Chicago, though, there’s always next year, which gives our lawmakers plenty of time to get together with the folks over at Apple. Surely they can work out the details for this great new app Illinois residents can purchase and download before Christmas. Imagine a world where the average citizen pays attention to things such as crop rotation and weather patterns, instead of, for example, how fast they can unroll pretend toilet paper.

You're Not Welcome, Mr. Kotter

We begin our bi-weekly column with a topic I hold especially dear to my heart: my money. Or, more accurately, my future money. As many of you know, I am a school teacher, and, like most school teachers, I hope to someday retire and never teach school again. While I do have a considerable number of years before I can retire, I nonetheless fantasize about this day quite often.

My plan is to go out on top, in my fifties, some year when no one else is retiring, thus leaving it up to me to soak up the attention. My retirement banquet will be a lavish affair, with finger foods and what not, with former students and colleagues taking turns at the podium, describing my overall greatness. The ceremonies will end with a clever yet inspiring speech by me before a band composed of actual musicians punctuates the evening with a rousing rendition of one of my favorite songs; perhaps the Indiana Jones theme or something from Green Day. Regardless, the night will be lovely. I can hardly wait.

Unfortunately, the State of Illinois is once again trying to ruin my life, raining on my future parade without my consent by threatening to molest my retirement savings. Without this money I will not be able to retire and therefore the aforementioned retirement ceremony, while undoubtedly fun in its own right, will be terribly awkward and perhaps even unethical, depending on whether or not I tell the DJ.

The main reason the state is thinking about ruining my retirement decades before it even begins is because Illinois, while aesthetically pleasant in the autumn, is bad at being a state. Somehow we are broke. As to how a state the size of Illinois, with acres upon acres of farmland, numerous navigable rivers, access to the Great Lakes and one of the largest cities on Earth can be broke defies logic, but I suspect it may be connected to the fact that many of our governors eventually get arrested.

But I digress. Back to my future money problems. As a teacher, my retirement savings plan functions like this: Let’s pretend, for the sake of easy-to-comprehend-round-numbers, my salary is one-thousand dollars a year. The governments—state and federal—take about two hundred out of that and then another hundred goes to TRS—the Teacher’s Retirement System—leaving me with approximately 70% of my salary. The idea behind this is that the state believes it is better at saving for my retirement than I am, and so it pools all this cash together in a giant money cauldron, I guess, earning money on interest and investments, simmering for decades, and then when I retire they will start handing me the money at a fraction of my former salary.

On paper this sounds like a reasonable idea. Because of the earnings all the collective money has garnered, coupled with the fact that some people die, there should be enough money in the pot to finance part of my retirement, at least enough for me to avoid excessive panhandling. The problem, though, is that the money cauldron is a great idea, and, like many wonderful ideas, it has been abused by legislators without good ideas of their own. Since the money cauldron is full and Springfield is broke, Springfield has decided that perhaps they could use my money to fix problems I did not cause nor even entirely understand.

Boo! I say! Boo to this numbskullery! Does anyone have any idea what is going to happen if teachers do not get their money when they retire? Many of them, because they have become accustomed to paying for things instead of stealing them, will not retire, year after year, leaving our school system in the throes of a geriatric nightmare.

Remember when you were in school? Remember the “old teacher” that taught your parents in kindergarten, the one that fell asleep in the middle of the Bunsen burner experiment? How many of our amusing anecdotes about these teachers end with life-affirming tidbits such as “And that old Mr. Tone inspired me to become a heart surgeon the day they wheeled him out of study hall.”

No. No, they end with lines like, “She told us that story seventeen times” or “I don’t even think he knew the cage was open.”

Do you know what happens when you put a sixty-five-year-old in a room full of seventh-graders? People die. Is this the future we want for our grandchildren? A future where they are being taught by us, their grandparents? The answer to these questions, of course, is no. Surely there is a better solution to our state’s economic woes than to force people into situations that will, at the very least, result in someone being set on fire.

I have some ideas about possible solutions, but they must wait for discussion until my next entry in two weeks. After all, if I’m going to be teaching for another thirty-five years, I should probably go take a nap.