The Substitute Who Wanted Blueprints

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:03] Speaker B: Welcome back to the STM Daily News Podcast. I'm Rodney Washington and today I'm taking you back to the fifth grade. A week when my classmates and I went through more substitute teachers than a fast food drive thru at lunchtime midweek. In comes this substitute who had, let's call it, an interesting energy. You know the type, the kind of adult you couldn't quite tell was incredibly wise or running on zero sleep and six cups of instant coffee. He walks to the front of the classroom and says, all right everyone, today we're drawing schematics of our houses. Schematics, not drawings. Not show me where your bedroom is. Blueprint level schematics. Fifth grade. He wanted to know where we slept, where our parents slept, where the dog slept. Basically everything short of our Social Security numbers. Now maybe he was really inspired by that month's Highlights magazine guide on drawing floor plans. Or, and I say this as a completely rhetorical adult observation, maybe he worked a graveyard shift as a cat burglar and decided to collect some intel while covering a classroom. No judgment. While the rest of the class started drawing their actual houses, my imagination did what it always did. It took over the controls. I created a house that didn't exist anywhere in the tri state area. I gave my parents a giant master bedroom, put the kids rooms on the other side of the house like we were living in a suburban resort, put the kitchen in the center of the home like an architectural command center, and topped it off with a two story doghouse for our dog. Because of course, that afternoon I showed the drawing to my mom when I told her we were asked to draw our real house. The look on her face was priceless. If parental instincts had a soundtrack, hers would have been the Mission Impossible theme. But then she saw my drawing and immediately relaxed. She said, this isn't our house. And I said nope, I made it up. Looking back, if that substitute really was moonlighting as a cat burglar, my fake blueprint probably sent him to completely the wrong home. Which honestly might be my greatest early act of civic protection. If you want to read the full story with all the humor, details and visuals, head over to stmdailynews.com and check out the complete blog post. And don't forget to sign up for our newsletter so you never miss an update or new story. Thanks for listening. See you next time. [00:02:33] Speaker A: Sam.