I don’t ever laugh at things related to bathrooms, but Singapore is pushing even my Victorian limits.  Here are my two favorite signs of late:

Who was on the committee that designed that second one?  Did someone hire an ad firm?  I’m still trying to figure this out.

On an entirely unrelated note, life was back to normal for me today at SAS (that’s Singapore American School, if you’re just jumping in).  That means that I’m back to giving welcome presentations to new families (in which I pretend to know all about life at SAS), having individual meetings with new students and their parents (in which I pretend to know tiny details about the SAS curriculum), and scheduling students into classes for the upcoming year (in which I pretend to understand an extremely complex and nonintuitive database).

The scheduling part of my job has both extremely satisfying and deeply frustrating elements.  When scheduling works, it’s like you’ve solved a super-tricky Sudoku puzzle.  You smile and sigh with relief and feel like doing a little happy dance.   And when it doesn’t work … well, when it doesn’t work, my colleague steps into my office and says, “wow, you should see your body language right now.”  My respect for Bob Carter, who used to do the scheduling at Park School, has increased tenfold.  Scheduling is only going to get more challenging as more classes fill up — and when all of the seniors come back next week and want to change their schedules so they can get into gym classes with their friends, I see some long nights ahead.

Just a heads-up:  as the school year gets underway, I suspect that I will blog less often.  If I disappear for a few days here and there, don’t be surprised — I’ll be back on the weekends!