No is working very well for me these days.

No, I won’t conduct oral exam in a 1.5m x 3m box room with no functioning air conditioning or opening windows. (They found me an air conditioned office after I spent an hour sitting in the corridor reading my book).

No I won’t work for you (after they kept me waiting for nearly a month to tell me whether or not I could work for them in the first place).

No, I won’t work for YOU at all (because your classrooms are windowless, air-conditioning free boxes jammed with smelly computing students and you pay 25% less than everyone else who wants to employ me).

I’ve mentioned before that ‘No’ is my word of the year, my theme for 2023, a real departure for me since I was always brought up to say ‘Yes’ and do whatever it takes to please others, no matter who they are or what they want. No is a hard word to say for me, and I’m pleasantly surprised and pleased that it’s getting easier to say. And I’m particularly pleased with the results: people do not instantly hate me, or if they do they hide it well, and I get what I want. And they get what they want too, ultimately, I guess.

The French have a phrase they use, a very passive-aggressive phrase designed to have the same effect as the English phrase “According to our records….” The French say “Sauf erreur de notre part….” – Excepting an error on our part, or Unless we’ve made a mistake….

I got a ‘Sauf erreur’ email on Monday. Which was a repeat of the email sent last Friday, Thursday, Tuesday and the Friday before that. It was from an intern working for the administration department of a school where I’ll start work on September 21, a little over 2 months after the first message was sent. I hadn’t seen the first four messages because they were sent to my Work email address. The fifth I saw because she’d sent it not only to my work address but also to my private, personal email address. Which annoyed me.

“No, you haven’t made a mistake,” I replied. “You haven’t received a reply from me because I haven’t sent one. I haven’t sent a reply because I’m on holiday. As you will know from the automatic replies sent to your first four emails to my work email address. My deepest, humblest, most sarcastic apologies for not replying earlier but I only have my phone with me and it’s a little difficult do read and reply to and fill in the five Word, Excel and PDF documents you sent on a phone. I’ll try to do better once I get home to my computer.”

“No need to apologise,” she replied. “I was just worried because I didn’t get a reply from you and thought there might be a problem.”

She hadn’t received my auto reply to her July 19 email, she said. Although she had received it to the subsequent 3 messages, the reply explaining that I’m on holiday and won’t reply until I get back to work.

I haven’t replied to her since.

I also haven’t replied to the student who contacted me via his school’s administration to say that, after maturely considering the marks I gave her/him in his exams two months ago, s/he’s not happy with them. I won’t be replying to her/him either. I’m not happy with his marks either, they were rubbish, but that is very much her/his problem, not mine.

And now I find this article in my Drafts folder, having forgotten about it for two years. I’m pleased to say that NO is still a favourite word, favourite because it’s taken me away from another school where I intensely disliked working, despite the lovely administration; students, you can treat me like an asshole for only so long before I give up on you. I give you the tools but I can’t make you pick them up and use them. If you think the bit of paper you get at the end of two years means you’re automatically entitled to a job, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying.