This Week's Featured Pet Peeve:

Spelling errors in a classroom.

How arbitrary are my neurotic vexations? I'll start a sentence with a conjunction, but a homophonous error will make me insane.

Before Brady can walk out of his preschool, he has to go around and individually bid adieu to each classmate. "Bye, Nolan. Buh-bye Sapphire*. Goodbye, other Brayden." As he was making his rounds, I started eyeing the craft shelf to avoid having some kind of Romper Room flashback. Cute little jars sat in a row on the shelf, each one bearing a label indicating their contents, even though the jars were clear. "Damn," I thought to myself, "someone here is a stickler for organization." It seemed a little redundant- a jar of pencils that said "PENCILS", a jar of paper clips that said... you guessed it, "PAPER CLIPS", and then, right there between the "GOOGLEY EYES" and "BEADS" was a jar of sparkly little gems. And it was labeled "SEQUENCE". This is the type of thing that most people either wouldn't notice, or wouldn't dwell on more than a flickering smirk. Not me. No no no no, not Anal Retentive About The Most Arbitrary Things Me. It's not like there was a teacher beating one of the kids or a lice outbreak, but I'll tell you what, I am never, ever thinking of that daycare the same way again. Granted, Bradyn will likely never know that the teacher who was obsessed with labeling everything wasn't so meticulous with her spelling(and it's not just like she transposed a few letters- this is an entirely different word here, people!!!) but it is very, very likely that every time I go to sign Brady out for the rest of his preschool career, I will look at the shelf above the sign-out book obsessive compulsively to see if the error is still there.



*If I had to guess who was Most Likely To Be Caught Playing Doctor Under The Swingset, my vote goes to the kid with the stripper name. Just sayin.