I live in Sablé-sur-Sarthe, a small French city of 15,000 souls that is surrounded by fields of corn and livestock.
I also happen to work as an English and Spanish teacher in a local high school. One particular aspect of said school is that the students follow vocational classes that train them for future careers as farmers.
This explains how perfectly normal it's considered to find, one morning, corn stalks propped against the teacher's lounge's walls. Yes, the teacher's lounge, the place where we molders of the nation's future minds chillax and take coffee breaks, is the ideal spot to have corn stalks. (Apparently, the only person who batted an eye at this oddity was city-raised Yours Truly.)
Another aspect of said school is the fact that there are horses everywhere. Lots and LOTS of horses. I often joke with my students saying that I have horses for neighbors.
That's not a joke. It's the truth.
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| Where my neigh-bors live. (Get it? NEIGH-bors? HAHAHAHAHAHA--okay, I'll stop with the bad puns.) |
Yes, where I teach, the students are taught how to ride and care for horses, and my fellow teachers are diligent, if at times forgetful, people.
Ergo, it should have been no surprise this morning when I went into the computer room to hook my USB stick into the computer's extra slot that I discovered that one of my colleagues had left their own USB stick attached to said computer.
"People forget USB sticks all the time," I thought to myself.
I slid the stick into the vacant slot, clicked on a random key on the keyboard to activate the computer from sleep mode, and waited for the background to appear on the screen.
This morning, a few minutes past 8 a.m., I didn't greet some random generic background image.
My colleague had forgotten to close the last file that he had been working on. Said particular file happened to explain, with great detail and full color images, the parts of a stallion's genitalia.
Yesssssssssssssssssss, that's right. Just let that sink in for a moment.
All I wanted to do was to print out a copy of a quiz, and I was confronted by images of a horse's penis and testicles. Not a bad start to the day.
Have you ever heard the crude hyperbolic expression "to be hung like a horse," which stipulates a man was fortunate to be well-endowed in the penile department?
I never want to hear that expression again.
And I certainly don't want to hear anything regarding horse testicles, either.
Barb the French Bean
