Hot For Teachers

Nurse Connie Lingus sat on one of the stools in Doctor Stuffinfuzz’s laboratory with her feet resting on top of the table in front of her. Raking a fingernail file across the acrylic extensions adorning one of her hands, she stared across the lab in the doctor’s direction with a confused look on her face.

She watched as her employer Doctor Stuffinfuzz bounded from one area of the gaping laboratory to the other gathering up random objects and dragging them back over to his primary workstation. Once there he would dump every article that he carried into a large, hard plastic container with a set of spinning blades at the bottom.

Nurse Lingus’ brow crinkled up in utter bewilderment as she watched him dump a series of textbooks into the vat of swirling goo. English. Science. Geometry.

Textbooks weren’t the only things to find their way into the spinning mixture that churned in the container courtesy of the spinning blades at the bottom. A ruler; protractor; chalk stick; spiral notebooks. All of which found their way into the solution.

“What in the world are you doing?” she asked him as she continued to scrape the file across her nails.

“How many times have I told you not to bother me when I’m working!?!” he yelled at her as he dumped two handfuls of wooden pencils into the mixture. “I haven’t the time or the patience to make any sort of attempt at dumbing down the brilliance of my work in order to fit it into a simple enough expression so as to be understood by the likes of you.”

“What…ever,” the nurse said as she dropped her eyes back down to her nails. “Probably won’t even work anyhow.” She brought her freshly filed nails up to her lips and blew a gust of breath at them.

“What is this nonsense you’re speaking, woman?” the white haired, white bearded scientist said to himself as he lowered his body to stare at the smoky gray solution mixing in the vat in front of him. “Will it work? Of course it will work,” he spoke softly.

Dr. Stuffinfuzz slowly began to step to his left. His eyes abandoned the sight of the vat for an image of the tube running out of the side of it. He chuckled softly as his eyes continued to follow the solution filled tube as it curved upward then downward then up again and down again until the solution abandoned the curvaceous road of glass piping for the downward swirl that eventually emptied it out into a funnel.

“When has anything that I have ever concocted not worked?” he continued to converse with himself as he followed the solution’s travels through the obstacle course of boiling fluid filled beakers, twisting tubing, and other lab equipment that cluttered the table in front of him.

“I’m pretty sure that I could site a multitude of occasions,” Nurse Lingus said to herself as she once again took to scraping the file across her nails.

“You shut your mouth!!!” Dr. Stuffinfuzz blurted out as he continued to sidestep his way down the table in front of him, his eyes never leaving the trail of fluid that moved through the arrangement of containers that covered the tabletop. “I know it will work.”

When he reached the end of the long table his eyes zeroed in on the tiny dropper that dripped a bright florescent purple fluid into the test tube resting beneath it.

“It just has to,” Dr. Stuffinfuzz said, watching the container slowly fill.