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Don’t worry, it’s just a parent
I’m reading this great book, Class Warfare: Inside the fight to fix America’s schools by Steven Brill (possibly the US’s premier investigative journalist). The author peppers the book with personal stories about the people who are trying to reform American education. With each chapter short, typically only two or three pages, reading the book is like eating salted nuts - you read one chapter and you have to read just one more. Here’s a typical anecdote (p. 86).
“August 19, 2002, was Joel Klein’s first day on the job as the New York City schools chancellor. Making his way to his office after navigating through the security process at the Board of Education headquarters in Brooklyn (which, after cleaning out two-thirds of the staff, he would soon abandon in favor of a building next to City Hall in Manhattan), Klein saw that a light on his phone console was blinking. ‘Don’t we need to answer that?’ he asked his new assistant, a veteran of the office he had just assumed and someone who, he recalls, looked at him as if certain she’d still be there when he, like the chancellors before him, had departed. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘That’s just some parent on hold who called complaining about something. If you let it blink long enough, she’ll go away.’ It was probably that morning that Klein began using a phrase that he would still repeat to friends multiple times a day eight years into his job: ‘You just can’t make this stuff up.’”