Another student, not one of my students, but another student just really wanted — His mom makes great Mexican food, and he just really wanted to bring some in. So he brought — he said, “I’m gonna bring in, I’m gonna bring in tamales.” And like, “Okay.” And then, you know, I don’t hear anything and then one day he just brings tamales. So — and he passed them out during lunch. But of course, we all have our lunches. You know, I mean, we didn’t plan for this because most people didn’t know it was coming. We didn’t certainly didn’t know what day it was.
So, he gave me a package of, um, tamales, and another para that was sitting with me in the lunchroom. We were watching kids. And then he took the rest of them to my teacher that I work with. I said — and you know, they distributed them around, and when I came back to the room, I said, “I’ve got my tamales. I’m gonna put them in the fridge and I’m gonna have them for lunch tomorrow.” And she said, “Oh, will you take this bag of leftover ones and put it in the fridge as well?” “Sure.” “But the — but don’t put the bag in there because he wants the bag back.” I mean yeah, I can do that, so I made a special place to put my tamale and the tamales that she was, um, taking.
And went on throughout the day, and then I went home. And I came back to work the next day expecting, expecting my lunch would be in the fridge and then opened it up to put them in my lunch bag, and then — and they weren’t there. I’m like, “Where are the tamales? I laid my tamales right here!” And she goes, “Oh my gosh, I just took them all home,” and [laughs] — and I’m like, “Why? Why would you do that?” And I, um, I became more upset than I normally would become. But my, it wasn’t about the tamales for me. It was the fact that I didn’t have any lunch. It was like, that was all I was eating, was this thing I had set aside from the day before.
And she goes, “I’ll go home at lunch.” And I already knew that she wasn’t gonna be able to go home at lunch because she was having a meeting during her lunch, so she wasn’t gonna able to go home at lunch and get those. And I’m like, “No.” I said — And she says, “I think there might be some left over in the fridgerator next door, that, um, that people –” I said, “I’m not going to go take something away from — that somebody else is planning on eating because I got mine taken away. I’m not doing it. I will just buy lunch in the cafeteria.”
Well she, she could not let it go. And I feel bad that she got — that she felt so bad. Because it did piss me off, but it was like, whatever. And she’s, “Well, I’ll bring them tomorrow.” And then later, later on I’m like, “No,” because — I said, “No,” I said, “I’ve got stuff, leftovers I’m bringing tomorrow. Just, just keep ‘em.” And that, you know, that hurt her feelings, I know, but in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, I’m going, “I have to buy my lunch today. And then you tell me you’re going to bring me something tomorrow, but possibly you won’t follow through, because you already showed that you were flakey.”
So that was part of my decision to say no. She’s, “But please let me fix this.” And she ended up finding some tamales that nobody was going to eat next door. So she did fix it but — and then she came in to where I was and I’m like, “Please tell me this is not about the tamales. Stop.” She’s, “No no no. But listen, I’ve got — I’ve found some tamales. So you know, please take them.” I’m like, “Okay. Okay.”