Yes, it really is some big deal here – to be employed with a contract with no fixed end date!  So, here I am, a properly employed (dipendente) person.  I was also told, yesterday, that I was a level 7 employee which, so I am told, is the highest level.  However, this being the country that it is, I now have a clocking in card!  This is the first time that I have ever had one of these and I am sure I shall forget to use it many times.  We’ll have to see how important that is.  But we are in Italy, where rules and red tape are so important.

In the meantime, it would seem that we are about to also congratulate V for getting the same status where he is working.  He should know by the end of the day.

On another subject, however, whilst surfing the internet for something (I forget what, exactly) yesterday, I found a story that really caught my eye.  You can see one of the examples here.

What really makes the whole thing much more fun is the way that this has been reported.  One wonders who started the whole thing by adding ‘off’ to ‘cutting’ and I think it would be fun to have traced the explosion from that one source.

Of course, the idea that a substitute teacher should cut a child’s tongue is bad enough, but the thought that the same teacher had cut off the child’s tongue has a whole new meaning.  I found myself laughing at this.  The reason was simply because the thread on a forum that I found (but, alas, today I cannot find it), started with the same premise that they had picked from somewhere else (i.e. that the teacher had cut off the tongue), but as the thread went on people realised that this could not be so, otherwise it would have had a much bigger impact rather than the reprimand or sacking that seems to have taken place.

I just wish I could find the thread for you.

However, the point is that, my general distrust of the media (and by that I mean newspapers, radio and television), which many of you may know about, as I was the subject of such mis-reporting some years ago, gathers apace.  Although in most reports you see that it is correctly (well, I assume correctly) reported that the teacher only cut the child’s tongue, the initial finds yesterday were all reporting cut off rather than cut.

Of course it came from Milan and it may have been an Italian’s enthusiasm for using English phrasal verbs that was at fault, but from the report above, you can see that it did spread around the world quite fast.  I probably cannot find the thread now because it has been, subsequently, corrected.

In all events, I prefer the cutting off of the tongue as that gives a much more vivid picture of life in a Milanese classroom!  No wonder that the boy now runs away whenever he sees someone holding a pair of scissors!  And I do love the idea that the teacher can claim that the whole thing was ‘an accident’.