Flex Day: A Tragedy in Tube Socks

Another Flex Day had dawned—yet again a gaudy parade of icebreaker drivel, PowerPoint piety, and educational workshops led by people who looked like they’d been conjured by a bureaucratic séance. Against my better instincts—and with a flicker of masochistic hope I should’ve interrogated—I signed up for a session titled Exercise and Mental Wellness. It was being held in the Hobcallow campus gym, a crumbling monument to deferred maintenance and broken promises. If buildings could sigh, this one would’ve let out a long, exhausted groan. Everything about it screamed “run,” but I ignored the sirens blaring in my skull and walked straight in, armed with denial and a water bottle.

The gym was a fluorescent-lit dungeon, the kind of place where even the light seemed desperate to escape. The air reeked of mildew, ancient sweat, and the crushed dreams of generations who’d suffered through dodgeball and underfunding. I could practically hear the scent—a low moan of institutional despair.

Then the “fitness expert” took the stage. He looked like he subsisted on steamed kale and unprocessed anxiety. His limbs were pipe cleaners, and his tube socks rode high up his shins like he was waving tiny surrender flags. A whistle hung from his neck, though it clearly served more as costume than command. The guy had the aura of a substitute gym teacher in a 1979 after-school special—minus the charm. With the fervor of a man unveiling the cure for cancer, he launched into a sermon on the redemptive power of push-ups. According to him, daily push-ups could defeat depression, boost classroom charisma, and chisel us into statues Michelangelo would envy.

I sat among fifty or so other professors, all of us bearing the glazed, shell-shocked expressions of people who’d just survived a bureaucratic earthquake. When the whistle-wielder asked for a volunteer to demonstrate the proper push-up, silence fell across the gym like a dropped curtain. Heavy. Suffocating. It was the sound of collective academic burnout, of souls ground into dust by budget cuts and endless committee meetings.

Eventually, someone was nudged forward. “Volunteer” was a generous word. The man was more of a human offering. He shuffled onto the stage in a suit that draped off him like wet laundry. His glasses clung to his face like they were afraid to be part of what came next. He moved like a man who had made a series of increasingly regrettable choices that had all led here.

Then he went down for the push-up—and the moment collapsed into slapstick tragedy. His arms gave out instantly, like a folding chair kicked from behind. His glasses launched from his face and slid across the gym floor, desperate for escape. He lay there wheezing like a deflating accordion, the very embodiment of what happens when the intellect thrives and the body is left for dead.

You’d think someone might offer sympathy. A supportive chuckle. Maybe a smattering of ironic applause. Nope. The room was pure stone—emotionally fossilized. A few professors exchanged murmured postmortems. Most stared ahead with the blank-eyed stillness of DMV patrons or people deep into a hostage negotiation.

And when it finally ended, I fled. I bolted, heart pounding, mind racing, lungs grateful just to be outside again. It wasn’t enlightenment I’d found that day. Just confirmation: some kinds of despair really do come with a whistle.

After surviving thirty Flex Days—each one more spiritually numbing than the last—I’ve come to a grim conclusion: these spectacles aren’t designed to make us better instructors. No, they’re the bureaucratic equivalent of waterboarding. Their true purpose is to remind us, in the most humiliating way possible, that we are not free agents but indentured servants to a cabal of institutional overlords who wouldn’t recognize actual education if it bit them on their lanyards. The activities they concoct—team-building scavenger hunts, trust falls, and workshops on how to smile while grading—aren’t just irrelevant to higher learning. They are a brazen insult to critical thinking itself, proof that the people orchestrating these charades are not only disconnected from the classroom, but from basic cognitive function. Flex Days are not professional development; they’re intellectual purgatory dressed up in business casual.