A teacher in Italy, who has quickly become my queen, was sacked after she avoided going to work for 20 years.
Two. Zero. Twenty. God, I love her.
Cinzio Paolina De Lio specialised in literature and philosophy, and taught at a high school near Venice. She was employed for 24 years but only worked four of them, the BBC reported. For the first 10 years she just, like, never turned up, but then for the next 14 years she claimed she couldn’t come in ‘cos of illness and personal or family reasons. Absolute icon behaviour, if you ask me.
The agent of caos was given the sack in 2017 after she rocked up to work for four months and, essentially, did fuck all. According to the Mirror, her students claimed she fired off texts during exams, never carried the textbook so she’d have to borrow a copy off some poor kid, and dished out marks willy-nilly.
Look, I’m just gonna say it: this is classic literature teacher behaviour. I once had a teacher who forgot to come to class on a day that we had a test. It’s just in their DNA, you know?
But alas, I digress. Shit hit the fan for old mate De Lio when, during one of her rogue appearances at school, inspectors conducted a routine examination. They found she was “unprepared” and “inattentive”, and her students did jack shit in class ‘cos she was always on her dang phone, per The Times.
So, unsurprisingly, she was fired. But in a semi-surprising turn of events, her dismissal turned into this huge legal battle which ended up going all the way up to Italy’s top court.
De Lio successfully appealed her dismissal and was reinstated as a teacher in 2018, but then the education ministry appealed against the decision and the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation was like, “yeah, maybe this chick shouldn’t be a teacher”, per the BBC. Thus they reversed the decision last week.
The top court said De Lio was “permanently and absolutely unsuitable” to be a teacher, The Times reported. The court also poo-poohed her defence of “freedom of teaching” ‘cos they argued teachers should, you know, be the ones ensuring that students have a right to education.
As if the story couldn’t get better, when journalists from Italian newspaper la Repubblica approached De Lio for comment she said: “Sorry, but right now I’m at the beach.”
HAHAHAHAHAHA. THE BEACH! She has absolutely won the IDGAF War. I can’t help but wonder how much simpler my life would be if I just didn’t give as much of a fuck à la Cinzio Paolina De Lio.
Per the Mirror, she also said she wanted to “reconstruct the truth of the facts of this absolutely unique and surreal story”.
“I don’t answer questions from journalists thrown around that wouldn’t do justice to the truth of my story”, she said.
I am so gagged by this woman. I’m obsessed. I need an eight-part dramatisation on Netflix, and I need it pronto.
The pièce de résistance, the maraschino cherry on top, is that her workplace branded her the “worst employee in Italy”, according to the Mirror.
However, I would argue that she is, in fact, the smartest employee in Italy. Earning a salary for 24 years but only working for four of them? Please, I know De Lio hasn’t died yet, but send her to the Vatican to be canonised. Her iconic work must be remembered for centuries to come.
Image credit: Glee / Fox
