I once read an interview with a famous spy who told how the spy life is not very adventurous and often consists of boring hours of waiting, of poring on papers, of filling reports …

I often think about this interview when I realize that my interlocutor is thinking about my job of “School Director” as that of an intellectual,  thinking all day about new teaching techniques, linguistics, tests and exams … as a matter of fact, since the school is made by a messy bunch of gloriously real people, I spend most of my time attending the following activities: replacing the toilet paper, emptying the bins (forgotten by the cleaning personnel), separating the waste that someone has mistakenly mixed (fishing the plastic cups from the paper box), emergency-mopping the floor where someone has spilled coffee, unclogging the toilet, carrying piles of books from floor to floor, unlocking the wifi, calling the elevator service (while trying to free the student imprisoned in the elevator) … yes, it’s a dirty work, but someone has to do it… 

The thing is, if you really care about the place you work in, if you really care about your customers, you do not want – not even for a minute – to have a dirty floor, a wifi out of order, a clogged toilet. Therefore, the director mantra becomes Leporello’s line “son prontissimo a servir “.