My first teaching job was for a generous man, he paid me the bare minimum, but tried to make it sound
like heaps of cash. It was in his school that I was thrust for the
first time in front of sixteen teenage students affecting varying states
of interest, or disinterest to such a degree that it
was an art form to admire. The owner later confessed that he would listen at
the door during my lessons to gauge the humour of the class, of which he
told me later was happy and engaged, I was a success!
He was so impressed that he decided to kill me, but in a cunningly manner,.

The owner had rented a room in a building in Suwałki, in an
attempt to offer lessons to the locals, and now I was part of his plan. 

The idea was for him to drive me from Olecko to Suwałk so that I
could take lessons. But here was the rub, it was winter. The road from Olecko to Suwałki can
at the best of times be described as interesting, and at other times as 
plain bloody dangerous.

Imagine the temperatures hovering anything from -10 to -25 with the road coated in compacted 

with ice and incredibly slippery,  an ardent fan of the Cresta Run would not have felt out of place.
Now as if the conditions were not enough,  I had the Bosss and his aged
VW with all the comfort of a 18th century cart, trying to kill me on the
road. He attempted this by driving fast, then a little faster, and then he
would slam on his breaks and wait to see the result. 

The result varied, but I am still alive but can attest to the fact that we did, how can I say
without overstating things, wobble a bit from time to time! It was at this
point he would look at me with a huge smile and state that ‘’it was not
too slippery’’. I smiled the smile of the condemned and agreed as best
I could in my alarmingly limited Polish, that yes, in fact the road covered
in compacted ice, being travelled at highly disproportionate speeds under the conditions, was in

 fact slippery. Shock, horror, what a revelation!