She might have kept her nightmare day to herself if she had not been so fucking hungry. Hangry the kids say now and that’s what she was after working and failing at teaching her college journalism classes and basically not eating during the half hour available for stuffing food in her face between classes.

The rules say no eating in classes. No eating in buildings. No eating without wearing a mask. No fucking eating, really, unless you’re in the middle of the Redwood Bowl with no one around for miles. Time of covid. No eating.

She dreamed of Hey Juan’s big ass veggie super burrito while she prepped for disaster two.

Be easy on your self today, she told herself before the first class, the morning class, the class where the projector wouldn’t turn on and the 12 remote students tried to talk and to engage but she couldn’t hear them. She could see the remote students on huge TV screens at the back of the room and on her computer monitor, one of two or three if you counted the tablet attached to the table.

“If you want to say anything,” she shouted at the circular microphone in the center of the room, “just type it into the chat!”

“I don’t know why I’m screaming,” she said to the 12 students in the classroom. She poked her head around the monitor to look at all of them with their adorable masked college student faces. One student pulled his mask down to sip an energy drink. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was no drinking or eating in Gist Hall let alone in the classroom let alone while sitting in front of a new bigass iMac. Because she was hungry too, already hungry, already ravenous down so deep in her soul hungry like a wolf starving in the socially isolated snow, hungry like an infant suckling at a barren breast on a sickly too thin mom who’s also starved.

No one knew how to be in the classroom. The remote students were comfortable in their black boxes, showing only their name, which made attendance taking super fucking easy. She longed for the days before hyflex, basically every day up until now, this day, the first day that she actually tries to use the thousands of dollars worth of technology set up in this room to help her teach two distinctly different student groups at once.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she admitted to everyone. A camera mounted on the ceiling tracker her movements. She saw herself, the top of her head and a foreshortened body on another huge television screen. The zoom speaker screen. “If I talk to those of you in the room, I feel like I’m ignoring those of you at home. If I talk to those of you on Zoom, I’m ignoring the human beings who’ve gathered here for some face time in Gist 215.”

The students probably didn’t say anything. It’s possible that Liam or Sam tried to ask a question but she really couldn’t hear through the mask. She lowered the mask, inadvertently, to address the remote students. “Can you even hear me? Do the little hand raisey thing if you can hear me?”

The sound didn’t work because the projector wouldn’t turn on and the speakers were attached to the projector. All the sound is channeled through the ipad like device the syntechdowhatdome, said the tech who trained her for 20 minutes and said she’d been a quick learner. But now the syntechdowhatdome was locked in an unfamiliar zone and she couldn’t get back to the place where one might press a button to warm up the projector and start the speaker.

She assigned the students a task. She paired up the in-class students and sent them out to interview each other outside, where all the bad covid gets whisked away by the wind and fresh air. Ventilation matters. She’d read the studies. Then she paired up the remote students into zoom breakout rooms. If you have any issues, text my cell phone because I can’t see the chats in your breakout rooms. She typed her cell number into the chat. When everyone was thus busy with the business of active learning, she called the tech help desk. She reached a recording and waited on hold. A text came through. I’m in a waiting room with the room.

A waiting room with the room. Ah, yes. The room itself was a participant in the zoom meeting. That had been part of the training. Start the zoom meeting. Invite the room to the zoom meeting. That’s how the students end up on the bigass TV and that’s how she ended up on the other bigass TV as the featured speaker with the camera tracking her as she moved from right to left or even all around the room. What a camera! What a spectacular fucking camera!

About the time a tech finally arrived, the kids were all back with their interviews as videos on their phones. By that time, she’d actually figured out where she went wrong with the syntechdowhatdome. She’d figured out how to turn on the projector at least. The tech helped out by connecting the zoom audio to the snytechdowhatdome.

And they all played their videos. The students in Los Angeles filmed their classmates’ phone cameras in front of palm trees by the mall or in Bay Area bedrooms. Some simply filmed the black box with the name and disembodied voice.

The in-class students recorded each other in the art quad and outside on the street. Lovely ambient traffic noise, she commented as she watched the video. We could put these all together and the compilation would be a good reminder of what today was like, Sept. 7l, 2021, the first day of hyflex classrooming at Humboldt State University.

The students in the class wouldn’t let her berate herself.  It’s ok, one said, we didn’t really care about anything. We just wanted to be in a room with other people. And we were!

So it wasn’t the worst nightmare. She was grateful for that. But then there was no food and lots of demands before the next class. The hour flew by and she didn’t arrive early and this was another classroom with different glitches and the projector wouldn’t go on and the sound wasn’t working and there would be no breakout groups. The students in the room chatted joyously while the online students waited and she fiddled and called for tech help again. And just after she called it – forget it, guys, I’m wasting everyone’s time. Let’s try again Thursday, the tech showed up then and said oh yeah this locks up so you need to drag this icon out of this box on the syntecdowhatdome and then just drag it back in. That resets it or something.

But by then the students were all out of the room, minus the news editor who said, didn’t you bring muffins and can I have one?

The tech was still talking to her – of course, take all the muffins, she said – and the tech said to her, remember that the sound always comes through the snytechdowhatdome.

It was a long day. And she could have kept it all to herself. But when she got home, she dissolved into the couch, sobbing I’m hungry so hungry, like a polar bear in the arctic wasteland hungry, where’s my dinner, family and why is it not warm and waiting for me after this shit fuck and pissball of a day. The retired boy made her fish and a salad and it was ok but it wasn’t Hey Juan’s and she didn’t cry again until that night after half a bottle of Kirkland merlot and before watching the latest episode of “Nine Perfect Strangers” on Hulu or was it “See” on Apple TV, that post apocalyptic show about the future of the world’s population all being born blind?