Chapter 43. Guest Teacher
Rhys unfolded the letter and began to read the ‘guest teacher’s’ response to their Schoolmaster, Aquari.
Schoolmistress Aquari,
I write to you today to—
Immediately, Rhys’ eyes blurred. The full power of Speed Reading and skimming kicked in, and he blazed ahead, skipping past hundreds of lines of formulaic letter writing and business jargon to zip directly to the important parts.
He stopped on one line. His eyes widened. He leaned in, reading it a second time, narrowing his eyes to fully lock in and read past the legalese and jargon to understand exactly what the guest teacher was actually saying.
…I look forward to enjoying your school’s atmosphere and academic prowess. I know I will find it satisfactory, as your students will surely also be satisfactory, and so, too, your staff. Although I’m a remedial teacher within my own Academy, please do not take that as any sort of inditement. I have also been identified as one of the most skillful teachers, and I assure you that Purple Dawn Academy is sending its best… in my opinion, anyways. A little humor!
“Well, he’s got a shit sense of humor,” Rhys muttered to himself.
But that was the less important to the true danger hidden in those words. “Find them satisfactory.” He knew what that really meant. Decoding the corporatism out of the words, what the teacher was really saying, was match up to our standards, which we have specifically set to be impossible for you to meet, or face the immediate destruction of your team regardless of how well it actually works or how high quality the work you produce is. Maybe he was bearing a bit of a grudge from his first life, but he didn’t see it that way. The scales had fallen off his eyes. He no longer trusted any large organization to do the right thing, or actually care about the little guy. All big corporations—ahem, schools—cared about was making the most profit possible, or consolidating as much power as possible. If they already had power and money, then their goal was to make even more money and gain even more power, so that they could maximally abuse all the workers and weaker people beneath them.
‘Rule of the jungle?’ ‘Harsh realities of the feudal system?’ What a joke! These practices were alive and well in his world. They permeated every single piece of his work life, whether he worked for a big organization, a small organization, did contracting or even worked on his own. The only way to opt out, was to become so big, rich, and powerful that he could personally ignore the bullshit.
And in this life, just as in his previous one, he was far, far away from achieving that. Unlike his original life, though, he had a path to achieving that ideal freedom that he’d long dreamed of. It might be through the trash, but he wasn’t going to complain! Any path was better than no path at all. What better path for a trashy guy like him, who got stepped on and neglected all his life, than to empower himself through that very same trash?