The High Price of Love -- by Anne Shier

If you had the choice of falling in love with whomever you wanted, who would that person be?  Would he be someone who works in a professional field, like medicine or law or dentistry?  Would he be someone you’d met while you were working in a similar professional capacity?  Specifically, what would the repercussions be if you were a teacher and the person you’d met was a student that you’d found attractive?  Because, any way you look at it, anything is possible.  Life is a crapshoot, after all.  We never really know what we’re going to end up doing for a living, where we’re going to be doing it and who we’re going to meet along the way.  If the person you’ve just met happens to be a very attractive student and he, likewise, finds you to be a very attractive teacher, what are you supposed to do about it?  Pretend he doesn’t exist?  Read him the riot act and warn him that romantic relationships between teachers and students are strictly forbidden?  It’s not an easy question to answer.

The Ontario College of Teachers (OCT), which is the governing body for all public school teachers in Ontario forbids such relationships because of the fact that a teacher is always regarded as an authority figure over students and a student is always regarded as someone who is subject to the authority of teachers.  Even a teacher who doesn’t have direct authority over a particular student is still discouraged from any such liaison with that student.  It doesn’t matter if the student is 18 years of age or older; the same rules apply.  The thing is – we’re all human beings and, regardless of whether a person is a teacher or a student, people in these positions sometimes do get together, fall in love, and even marry each other.  This kind of gossip inevitably tends to make it into the lunchroom at school.  Some of my colleagues even knew teachers to whom this very thing happened.  And, depending on when the incident happened, a teacher could be severely reprimanded for such a relationship if discovered by the OCT; but, most likely, these days, he/she would have his/her teaching licence revoked for such behaviour and, thus, would never be able to teach in a publicly-funded school again.

Once upon a time, I met an attractive young man, aged 16, who was a student at the same school where I worked as an LTO (Long Term Occasional) teacher.  Although he was not my student, per se, he and I happened to meet one day, accidently, in the school gym where a “study hall” was located, temporarily, for that period of the schedule.  I saw him playing a guitar and singing softly to a group of students in the corner of the gym.  At the end of the period, I went up to him and introduced myself as Ms. Sophie Zenkman.  I wanted to express my admiration of his guitar-playing and his singing.  That’s when he told me his name, Adam, and we struck up a conversation during which he invited me to come to a performance of his rock band, called “Young Blood”, at the time.  He said they played on a regular basis downtown at a place on Queen Street West, and that, if I could make it over there to see them play one evening on the weekend, he would be delighted to have me there and would introduce me to his band. 

Did I find him attractive?  Yes.  Did I want to get involved with him?  No, not romantically; I just wanted him as a friend.  I realized at the time, that despite my feelings of attraction to him, I should not do anything stupid like jeopardizing my position as a teacher.  I regard being a teacher as being in a “special” profession.  Perhaps most teachers feel this way about their chosen profession; teaching is something I feel is for people who really want to make a difference in the world, or at least in their students’ lives.  Yet, I could not help thinking that this young man seemed to display a lot of musical talent and I wanted to see more of it.  I ended up not only going to see one performance of his band, I saw several performances over a period of a year or more, and the band members and I all became good friends.  Today, even though I no longer see him, I continue to have a soft spot in my heart for him and hope that he is happy doing all the things that he wants to do in his life.

The stories I used to hear in the lunchroom at school had more to do with teachers who were at least 30 years old marrying their students after they’d graduated, of course – students who were 17, 18 or 19 at the time that the relationship was blossoming.  Somehow, I don’t believe that there were any hard-and-fast rules at the time about teacher-student relationships then.  There was no censorship of such relationships, and no way to stop them from happening.   The OCT didn’t exist then; it only came into being in the mid-to-late 1990’s.  The reason the OCT was created was that the Ontario government wanted to create a self-governing body, like those that exist in medicine and dentistry, to make teachers accountable for their breaches of professional conduct.  Teachers now have to pay a yearly licensing fee to be allowed to teach in any public school in Ontario.  This was the state of affairs when I became an LTO teacher and later a full time, contract teacher in Ontario.

Still, I have to ask myself from a strictly logical point of view:  what exactly is wrong with a teacher falling in love with a student (or vice-versa) provided the teacher does not have direct authority over the student at any time during the student’s high school career?  And, I couldn’t really come up with a satisfactory answer.  It just seemed to me that it’s something that should be discouraged from happening, yet it was happening and probably still is.

I’m sure you’ve heard random things about legal clients falling for their lawyers and a sexual relationship happening between them.  No one ever said to me that lawyers and their clients couldn’t be romantically involved with each other.  However, it would probably be considered a “breach of conduct” on the part of the lawyer.  Could it be true that lawyers can be disbarred for sleeping with their clients?  That is a question to which I do not have the answer.

Remember that notorious story of the married female elementary school teacher in the U.S. who got involved with one of her male child students and was later prosecuted for such behaviour?  Her name was Mary Kay Letourneau. She went to jail for her illicit behaviour, but even after she got out on parole, she continued to see the child even though the courts had specifically forbidden them to have any contact with each other.  As a result, she ended up having her parole revoked and finishing her sentence in jail.  Yet, none of that made any difference to her and the young man.  They had a child, got married and were very happy together.  Of course, her now-ex-husband, thoroughly mortified, disgusted and embarrassed by the whole affair and the fact that she’d gotten pregnant with the boy’s child, lost no time in divorcing her and moving far away from her with their 2 kids.  Understandably, he did not want his kids to be adversely affected by this strange relationship in which their mother was so ardently involved.

It seemed that nobody could keep Mary Kay and her child lover apart – not the courts, or the child’s mother, or Mary Kay’s employer, or her now-ex-husband.  None of that mattered to them when it came to being together as a couple.  To be sure, it was a strange couple, most people would say.  I believe she was in her late 20s or early 30s and he was just a child of perhaps 12 when it all started.  There was at least a 15 year difference between them.  Later on, when she had finally finished her stint in jail, he was still barely a teenager and they continued on together despite everything negative that was still happening around them.  I believe they’re still together to this day, married with children - at least one, anyway.  These two people would absolutely insist that their relationship was “meant to be” and they would be together no matter what.

My question now remains:  who does have the right to say who you can love and who you can’t love?  The government or the court system?  This is like saying relationships must be legalized even before they can begin.  The only exceptions I can think of that make any sense to me are relationships that are incestuous, that is, sex between family members, and sex between people in which one of them is a minor.  The story I just told you about Mary Kay and her child lover would definitely qualify in that realm.  Other than that, who’s to say what is right and what is wrong when it comes to romantic relationships?

copyright - Anne Shier, 2013, all rights reserved, published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

The Girl Who Had It All -- by Anne Shier

Today was going to be the big moment Zena Brennan had been looking forward to all her life—being on the Oprah Winfrey Network in an Internet radio interview. Her latest book, which had just come out in print, was called The Vixen and was getting rave reviews. That was a switch because her two previous books had hardly caused a ripple in the literary community. However, her author website had very professional-looking, up-to-date content on it, and her blog contained several interesting and unusual human-interest stories that were very lifelike. It was strange now that it was all finally coalescing. She had been through so much already that she had been seriously getting down on herself because she seemed fated for a life of mediocrity and she just couldn’t stand that idea. As she sat and thought about the past few years, she reflected on her life at work ...

        Zena was a hard worker who had gone all the way through university and earned a bachelor of commerce degree with high honours (80 percent average). Her heart was in the business world, where she wanted to make it strictly on her own merits. To this end, she got many opportunities to work in different jobs requiring different responsibilities. None of these jobs were all that challenging, but she took what she could from each job and built up an impressive repertoire of business experience. Regardless, no one seemed to take her abilities seriously, including her usually male bosses, her predominantly female co-workers, her boyfriend of three years and her family. It just didn’t make any sense. Why did they all have this anti-feminist attitude? She was just as good as anyone else at work, yet the pervasive attitudes persisted and she was getting more and more frustrated as time passed. After all, she was approaching 30 and still hadn’t found her niche in the world of work. Zena resolved not to quit trying though, since that would have played right into their hands. She was no quitter; she knew that if she quit, she would never win, and she intended to win in life, come hell or high water.

 Her male bosses and associates relentlessly hit on her. There wasn’t a week that went by when some man wasn’t flirting outrageously with her. She thought it was because being a woman in the business world was not perceived as anything important. As far as they were concerned, the business world belonged to men—they were the ones responsible for anything significant that happened. They needed the women who worked for them to act as support staff and “worker bees” only. Zena knew she was an excellent “worker bee”—everyone knew that. But the leadership skills that she craved to develop were not demanded nearly as often as her computer skills and intuitive business acumen.

One day, Zena decided she was no longer going to dwell on the negative aspects of working in the business world for male chauvinistic bosses, with female co-workers who constantly gossiped about her. Just how was she going make her mark in this world? She thought long and hard about it until she finally decided to write a book, due to the fact that she had always been an exemplary writer who now had a relevant history of events in her life worth writing about. Her first book would contain short stories about people and relationships, things to which she had had tons of exposure. Since good writing results from drawing on things you know about, this book was going to be “a piece of cake” compared to going to work every day for people who would never appreciate her innate talents. So instead, she would appreciate her own talents and build up her own confidence to the point where it no longer mattered what anyone—even her own family—thought of her. It wasn’t going to be easy, but it was going to be worth it.

 Her first book had received fair-to-good reviews—not great, but not bad—and she resolved to do better on her next book. It was a good first effort, but she knew she could improve. She resolved to write more short stories about juicier, meatier topics that people found irresistible. She also decided that only the five most populated cities in Canada and the United States would be included in her Authorhouse News Maker Publicity campaign that she would help plan; she resolved to follow up religiously on every interested media outlet with e-mail messages containing links to her author website and blog, and finally, she would send a complimentary copy of her book to every bookstore, public library and hospital gift shop in her residential metropolitan area whenever they requested one—and sometimes even when they didn’t.

When Oprah had first approached Zena about doing a radio interview, she couldn’t believe her good luck. She had always known Oprah had great influence over people, women in particular. People listened to Oprah whenever she recommended a movie to watch, a book to read or a career path to take. Oprah had a magical way with people. She made her guests on her former TV show feel at home, comfortable and willing to share with others in a public forum. Not many talk show hosts had this ability; in fact, some hosts wanted to create controversy on their shows—for example, the Jerry Springer Show, where people sometimes got into physical fights right on TV. But Oprah took the attitude that if she “kept it clean,” so to speak, people would not only tune in to watch her show, they would be willing guests. Thus Zena was thrilled to get such an invitation from Oprah, in person, to be interviewed live on radio in prime time. If there was something that was going to help promote her book to the top of the charts, this was it. She could not wait for the blessed event to occur.

But this radio interview was definitely not the only vehicle Zena planned to use for promoting her book. During her News Maker Publicity campaign, she also resolved to have the nations’ top newspapers promote her book: the LA Times, the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Toronto Star and the major newspapers in Vancouver and Houston. She did not want to leave any stone unturned; if there were also any prominent magazines or websites that she could access during her publicity campaign, she would include them too. It was extremely important to Zena to ensure thorough media coverage of this book, and to do it properly, she had to do her part as a writer to ensure that the things people wanted to read about most would be covered in her book, and they were, as far as she was concerned. She reflected on how her latest book, The Vixen, came to be created …
Zena had pondered long and hard about the theme for her latest book. It would take the form of a novella, based on an early short story she had written called “A Marriage Made in Heaven.” This novella was originally made up of three short stories and was later renamed The Vixen.       

        Zena’s radio interview with Oprah turned out to be everything she’d hoped for and more. Because of Oprah’s influence, the world now knew who Zena Brennan was; they knew about the two books she’d already published and about the book that was going to be released later this year. Not only that—they looked forward to it. From now on, only fate and the gods would determine what would happen next in Zena’s blossoming career.

copyright - Anne Shier, 2013, all rights reserved, published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA 

The Day My Identity Was Stolen -- by Anne Shier

(Inspired by Iain Watts' Networking Research Project called “Identity Theft,” June 2012.)

In recent years I’ve become ever more intensely aware of the possibility of identity theft. It happens to innocent people more often than you know. The guilty ones who actually do the stealing can do it in many ingenious ways and use the personal information that they’ve discovered in various ways to illegally obtain others’ money. Not only that, the victims of identity theft have their lives turned upside down and inside out, while trying to figure out how it could have happened to them. Identity thieves, from what I’ve gleaned, are somehow able to obtain key pieces of personal information, such as your SIN (Social Insurance Number), credit card number(s), mother’s maiden name, home address and date of birth, to name a few. With this critical key information, they’ve been known to gain citizenship in or the right to immigrate to this country or even use the information to apply for a job.
        Basically, there are two main kinds of identity theft: account takeover and true name theft. The accounts that the identity thief takes over can take many forms: e-mail, Facebook, bank or credit card accounts. At this point, I am personally most familiar with the fraudulent use of bank accounts because a similar incident happened to me when I lost my driver’s license last year. Fortunately, the woman who pretended to be me in my bank was ultimately prevented from accessing my bank account due to not having a bank access card and password, but still, the whole thing freaked me out. I had my bank put a system-wide message on my bank account that would pop up whenever anyone tried to access my bank account at any time or at any branch. It would prevent her from doing any bank business in my name without first showing proper identification to the bank’s officers. So far, this has been a very effective preventive measure.

However, true name theft involves the thief assuming the victim’s identity. When this happens, an identity thief can then do a number of things in the victim’s name: open new bank accounts and access them for funds; open new credit card accounts and charge them up; buy a new car on a fraudulent car loan or even take out a second mortgage on a home already owned by the victim. I’ve been told that these two different forms of identity theft are difficult to track by police, and it often takes a lot of time to catch the thief.

This year, I was unfortunate enough to have it happen yet again. Although I was aware of some of the sneaky and underhanded methods of such thieves, I was still taken by surprise. I knew enough not to give out my personal information on Internet websites with which I did not deal regularly—I knew this was called “phishing.” Although I did my best to delete e-mail messages from strangers, especially those e-mails that had attachments, and I never gave my password for any of my accounts to anyone, not even those I knew well, a theft still happened to me and you’ll never guess how. Someone must have gone through my garbage and found an old bill with my name and address on it and an account number of some sort. Could it be that easy to become a victim of an identity thief? Yes, and by the time I found out about the damage this person caused me, it took a long time to prove and correct it.

How could I have prevented this from happening? It became clear to me, only over time, that the only sure-fire way to prevent true name identity theft was to shred all important papers before disposing of them in the garbage. Such papers as old bills, credit card statements, bank statements/passbooks, and so on, would be of no use when they are completely shredded. I have been a pack rat for such a long time now that I hardly ever throw such things out—I keep them for a long time, locked up at home in a secure box. But still, it’s something that can happen.

Eventually, when these things become too old, I rip them up first and then toss them into the garbage. As far as I know, nothing with my name and address or any account information could be retrieved from the trash except in small pieces. I also got used to cutting up old credit cards and bank cards and any other cards that had my account information on them. My annual tax returns are either kept at home or in my work office in a locked file cabinet. They are all submitted online anyway, which I am told is the safest way to submit tax returns to the government. But you still have to keep the hardcopies handy for at least seven years. After that you can safely get rid of them.

  So, the only way I could come up with in which an identity thief could get my personal information was to just ask me for it. I thought it would have had to be someone I trusted, of course, but who? I racked my brain trying to figure out who I trusted that would do such a thing to me. Finally, I decided it had to have been a fake website that had somehow gotten the desired personal information from me and used it fraudulently. I suppose it must have appeared to me that the website was asking for my information to verify my account, but on second thought, it was probably asking for too much information for that purpose. I should have used my best judgment about such things since it was really the only thing that would have prevented that particular fake website from getting the personal information they needed.

When I think about it now, there was another incident—when I was mugged, right at the back door to my apartment building about 15 years ago. At dusk, a man just jogging by attacked me when my back was turned. In that case, my tote bag containing my wallet was stolen and it contained my personal information: SIN card, birth certificate, bank card, credit cards, health card and driver’s license. Incredibly, there wasn’t anything I owned of a personal nature that wasn’t in my tote bag that day. Later, my bag, minus all my personal stuff and money, was discovered much later in a dumpster. By that time, I had informed all the proper authorities to freeze my bank and credit card accounts, but I never saw my SIN card, health card, driver’s license or birth certificate again. To my knowledge, these items were never fraudulently used against me—I expect by now that they never will. I was just lucky that time. Regardless, it took at least six weeks to get all new bank cards, credit cards, my driver’s license and my health card back again—apparently, a “drop in the bucket” in terms of time when compared to true name identity theft gone amuck.

 One thing is for certain—I will never forget the feeling of being invaded, much like a person whose home has been invaded by an intruder. When something like that happens, your life is now out there for all to see. You have no privacy of any kind anymore. And the idea that the intruder can take your life over by stealing your identity becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Only if you are extremely lucky can you recover fully and live your life again the way you were meant to.

copyright - Anne Shier, 2013, all rights reserved, published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA