Mugs and BP

I am a bit nervous at the thought of walking in to work tomorrow.

I borrowed someone else's mug on Friday.

I say 'borrowed', but really I just used it without premission, and then got busted trying to sneak it back into the pack as the cleaning lady came along to take them away to the cleaning cupboard, and wash away, amongst other things,  my incriminating finger prints.

How bad can it be, you ask? How scary can a tired, caffeine deficient Home Economics teacher be? Let me tell you.

For starters, and you can have this for free, always fear a teacher: a teacher is a professional sponge, soaking up teenagers' insecurity at 30 projections an hour, a shining target for bullying, for around 20 classes a week.

So yes, you should fear that person. Never more than an eye blink away from doing a Peter Harvey. That's a whole lot of repressed anger.

The mug acts like the cap on the well. Once removed, it's not the simple act of replacing it, undetected. Remove that, and those years of sacrcastic comments ignored, graffiti scrawled insults, names shouted down a corridor, all those 'it wasn't me, Sir' and 'don't got a pen, do I?' and missing homeworks and worksheets dumped on the floor and feet on the desks and switch your phone off and why're you late again... out it all comes, spewing more vitrioil than a Tony Hayward press conference, spilling into the staff room.

OK, the difference is around $17 billion (ok, $1,600,999,996.50), but still, I've a right to be nervous. No one wants to be the cap the goes back on the well.