An Utterly Mortifying Situation

One thing that is very inevitable when it comes to accomplishing tasks late is frustration. Sometimes, these late accomplishments aren't your fault but you'd still have to take the fall for it if need be.

Image is mine||Edited on canva

I was bestowed with the responsibility of a dining prefect towards my last days in highschool. Just imagine being in charge of the tummies of the whole school; accuracy was very important. Many students couldn't manage hunger properly hence, if they didn't eat at the designated time, they got very restless.

Basically, I was in charge of the female's tummies and general wellbeing when it was time for food. On this particular occasion, the cooks had some complications and as such, dinner which was always taken by 5:30pm was moved to 6pm. Girls weren't supposed to be outside their hostel after 6pm but we(I and my fellow dining prefect) couldn't exactly leave them to starve and so, we led them to the dining hall and gave them specific instructions to just eat and head back to their hostels.

During the process of sharing the food amidst the rush, everywhere was disorganised. You would see girls at the male section of the dining and vice versa. I tried maintaining decorum but my mates were part of the "disorganised people" and so, I couldn't really do anything.

Thirty minutes later the boarding mistress arrived. The first sight she saw took her by surprise and so she immediately summoned me. I explained to her the situation at hand and she did what a boarding mistress would do;threaten them. She started walking around the dining hall, ordering the female students to leave and promising to punish them severely.

Honestly, I was happy at her arrival because Instead to trying to coordinate headstrong students, I could finally have dinner too. Two of my friends and myself decided to join our food together so that we would eat faster. We stood by a pillar and were hungrily digging in when our boarding mistressed stopped by us and asked "who just hissed?"

Our cheeks were literally filled with food and all we could do was make the 'hmm?' sound. She repeated her question again, looking very pissed. I spoke up, telling her that we weren't the ones as we were just here, eating as fast as we could. This woman was so adamant. She kept saying that one of us hissed and that she was going to report us to school authorities. We weren't guilty and so we kept trying to explain to her that the dining hall was really rowdy and this 'hiss' could have come from anyone.

No one really liked this woman as so, the hiss could have literally come from anyone.

She walked out on us and one hour later I was called out of the bathroom. Why? The boarding master and chaplain had summoned us. Hehe. Whenever cases reached the chaplains desk, then punishment wasn't inevitable. I still didn't budge as I knew that I wasn't guilty. We went to meet him and he persistently asked us individually if we were guilty and our answer still didn't change. Sir, we didn't hiss.

He kept trying to guilt-trip us with things like; "what if she was your mother? How would you feel if someone hissed at your mother?" and yati yada.

We all answered him honestly and after the whole session, the man tasked us with the responsibility of finding who hissed. Hilarious! Where would we even start from? In a school with over 700 boarding students? After weeks of basically doing nothing– because I knew that nobody would admit the blame– we came together and gave a general apology to the boarding mistress. We made her smile in the end.

The funny fact was, we didn't get any form of punishment which was very strange.With the way this case was being handled, if care wasn't taken, the three of us would have been deep soup as the Chaplin had a record of making you think that you were guilty even when you weren't. It was a narrow escape and I'm glad I was able to bypass such trivial allegations.

With love, wongi ✨