I’d head to Richmond each January to meet with my local state representatives regarding public school education issues. My state delegate just happened to be the majority leader. Each year, my little band of teachers would get an appointment with him, and he’d always be too busy to see us.

So one year, we tried a different strategy. We got our appointment (9:30) and got to his office suite early to check in with his secretary. The Speaker had a large 3 or 4 room suite at the end of a long entry hall. The secretary told us that he was busy in meetings elsewhere in the building and likely wouldn’t be back for our appointment. But we noticed, when someone opened his office door, that he was actually sitting at his desk. So we decided to wait him out.

Eventually, my three colleagues left for other appointments, but I stayed behind waiting by the secretary. Lo and behold, about an hour after our appointment time, a door well back down the hallway opened, and I glimpsed my Delegate, slink out and around the corner. Knowing how slow the elevators were in this building and how unlikely it was for him to take the stairs from the 7th floor, I followed. It turns out that the majority leader was full of crap. He was headed for the bathroom just around the corner. I waited a few seconds and followed him into the small restroom. Sure enough, he was parked right there behind the closed stall door. I went to relieve myself at the adjacent urinal. While pissing, I piped up and introduced myself expressing my disappointment that he wouldn’t see us after we went to the trouble of getting an appointment and traveling all the way across the state to see him.

When he was relieved, I was still waiting outside the restroom, joined now by my three colleagues who had just returned. He grudgingly escorted us back to his office and gave us 5 minutes of his precious time to not listen to us. I’ll never forget the angry glare I got from his bouncer, I mean, secretary as we walked by her desk into his palatial office.

When we got back home, I wrote up the encounter in my report to our local teacher members. A week or so later, I was urgently summoned to the school office right out of my third grade classroom. The majority leader was waiting on the line to tongue-lash me over my write-up of our meeting. His voice was …highly animated. I literally held the office phone away from my ear as he yelled for many minutes. Eventually, he ran out of steam, and we actually had a productive conversation.