Unfiltered Story #87849

While a student I spent two weeks one summer teaching English to rich European teenagers in Southampton, UK. During the week I spent my time in classes, while one weekend day would be spent accompanying the students on an excursion somewhere. Most of the time the teenagers were fine but every now and then you’d find one spoiled rich kid who was clealy angry at being ‘dumped in Britain’ by his or her ridiculously rich Belgian/Swedish/Russian parents. To make sure the students could easily identify staff, we all had to wear blue polo-neck shirts with the language school logo on both the front and the back.

One of those excursions on a really grey rainy day was to a theme park about an hour or two away from where we were based. Coincidentally, staff uniform at this particular theme park was almost the exact same shade of blue polo-neck shirt as teachers did.

This wasn’t much of a problem most of the day; coralling my assigned group of pupils, making sure they weren’t getting up to mischief and generally keeping tabs on everything while every now and then having to explain to a confused park visitor how I wasn’t actually working at the park was all I had to deal with.

Then some of my group wanted to go on some ‘thrilling’ new rollercoaster. It went backwards. In the dark. Woo. So, waiting in line with a group of the teenagers, a couple of whom were particularly belligerent, we notice we’ve been standing still for a bit of a while without moving. It turns out ‘something’ had happened with the rollercoaster – rumors were going around someone had vomited on the ride, but there was no official word on it.

Being the only person in the queue with a blue polo-neck on I suddenly get inundated with my own European teenagers asking me questions. Which prompted the rest of the crowd around me, and people deciding to back through the line because they couldn’t be bothered to wait, to also ask me questions with a couple (no joke) actually asking ‘what are we standing in line for?

Surrounded by non-English speaking students and British families on a rainy cold day out in a theme park I’d never been to in my life, all of whom saw me as a beacon of knowledge, ‘I don’t even work here’ really just didn’t seem to cut it.