I had an encounter with the Combine yesterday.  Namely, Atlantic High School is now dedicated to the task of breaking me of my assuredly dangerous habit of wearing flip-flops.  Because, you know, I’m going to whip them off in the middle of class and beat someone over the head with my shoes.  The full story:

On Wednesday, some delinquent threw a quarter at a fire sprinkler in my social anthropology teacher’s room, shattering the piece of glass that stops the water and leading to that one sprinkler dumping about six inches of water into the room, flooding it and the surrounding hallway.  In the process, the computer and projector in the room were also ruined, given that electronics and large quantities of water tend not to get along very well.  Ever the diligent teacher, I was sent by Mr Davis on Thursday morning to the “media center” (read: library, but more pretentious and less useful) to get a portable projector to connect to his laptop.  The learning must live on!

Only not so much.  Once in the media center, I got my request for a projector a third of the way out when the “media specialist” (read: librarian, but more pretentious and less useful) grunted, “You have no business even being here in those.”  Given the pronoun in his sentence is completely lacking in an antecedent, I settled on a quizzical look.  “Those flip-flops.  I’m going to take you to in-school suspension.”  Oh.  Those.

The question of me going to in-school suspension was mostly irrelevant, but I pointed out that Mr Davis was holding off on teaching with the hope that a projector would somehow find its way to his room via me.  So instead of grabbing a projector and being useful, Mr Hatcher (the media specialist) settled on walking me up to Mr Davis’ room, confiscating my ID card, and then letting my teacher know that, given the unacceptable status of my shoes as renegade flip-flops, I would have to be quarantined until/unless my parents were able to produce acceptable footwear.  I grabbed a copy of The Dobe !Kung, and off I went.

And so I sat.  And sat.  And sat.  For an hour and fifteen minutes until my dad showed up with my shoes and I was able to correct the dress code violation that apparently had gone unnoticed since the beginning of school, and for the three prior years during which I’ve work almost exclusively flip-flops.  What strikes me as most absurd about this whole situation is that it’s apparently only rubber flip-flops which are unacceptable; Mr Hatcher himself, while escorting me, noted that “if they were leather, you’d be fine.”

The complete idiocy of a rubber/leather flip-flop distinction aside, I’d just like to note that forcing students to sit in a room full of delinquents for an indeterminate amount of time because of a dress code infraction (regardless of its nature) is absurd.  As I pointed out to the large woman with no eyebrows who was manning the Heathen Quarantine, I was missing IB Social Anthropology because of my flip-flops.  Which, aside from being brown, are completely unremarkable and unoffensive.  You know, if there’s any sort of moral to all this, it’s the conclusion that the less time I have left in high school, the better.