Dear Bex,

Karen “the robot” Carter looks at me stonily.

“You’re sacked,” she barks.

I let out a mild squeak, like a stress ball being squashed by a steel-capped boot.

“But why?” I plead. “It’s not my fault I had to come in over the weekend. There was so much to do. Revision classes to prepare, homework to mark. So what if I had to sleep over on the staffroom sofa.”

Karen grimaces. “It’s not the fact you slept over in the staffroom that bothers me,” she huffs. “So much as the fact you appear to have been shaving your legs in the art room sink.”

“What do you expect?” I whine. “I can’t mark textbooks looking like Mr Tumnus from Narnia.”

She wrinkles her nose.

“Oh, and by the way, I owe you 12 bottles of PVA glue.”

The head raises an eyebrow.

“It’s just I was in a hurry and I’d run out of shaving foam.”

Out of the blue, Karen buries her head in her hands and starts to weep giant salty tears on to her Marks Spencer’s sweater.

“I don’t understand where I’m going wrong,” she wheezes, blowing her nose on a nearby rubber plant.

“Everyone I employ turns out to be a certifiable lunatic. I mean look at you,” she jabs a finger at me accusingly.

“When I hired you, you seemed like a lovely girl. But since then, you’ve skived, cheated, embarrassed yourself in front of pupils on YouTube and appeared in assembly drunk on at least one occasion. I’m starting to think I’m a bad manager. I’m starting to think maybe I should leave teaching, too.”

“Don’t be silly,” I coo. “You’ve been a real inspiration to me.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” she sniffs, “In fact, I think I’ll start drafting my resignation letter now.”

Love Kate x.