fine, just vanish into the ether, no PROBLEM

Okay, I need a break. I’ve had a 50-page list of stuff you can order from Food Services underfoot for weeks, and now of course I need it and of course it has completely vanished. I need it to so I can call Food Services and tell them to bring lunch to a different room on Thursday from the room I originally asked them to bring it to. There was some technology issue; we had to change rooms. I’m tired of making reservations and I’m tired of meetings and I’m tired of going through all this effort only to have to switch to another time/date/location/whatever. I hate hate HATE organizing meetings, and New Boss is having me organize, oh, EIGHT THOUSAND of them. She is trying to get off on the right foot and make a good impression with all the supervisors, so I understand why she is doing this, but I HATE ORGANIZING MEETINGS. And since we’ve been promised a new person in our office who will just handle student teaching matters, I feel even more irate and abused because of all this extra student-teaching-related work New Boss is giving me. I shouldn’t be doing this!! New Ghost Person needs to be doing this! It’s not supposed to be my job!

{Just have to note here that I’ve just had a call from someone needing me to mail her our licensure packet so she can apply for her license. She lives in a town called Eden and I said, "So, that’s E-D-E-N?" Loooooooong pause. In which I thought, "Oooops, I’ve given myself away! I’m a HEATHEN who can’t spell Eden, of all things!!!!!!" And then I had to fight the urge to burst into laughter for the rest of the – thankfully brief – call. } 

New Boss hasn’t even been here all week – she’s in Costa Rica, arranging student teaching stuff there along with Dr. Airhead (who emailed me to let me know he’s sitting around writing poetry and eating oranges grown from monkey-filled trees in the backyard) but she’ll be back tomorrow. SO I’m trying to get a little organized. That’s going real well. Where is that Food Services thing????  AGGGHHH!!! I just SAW it, and it was somewhere weird. Obviously that’s where it still is. Too bad I didn’t make a mental note of what weird spot it was occupying at the time. Well, I can look the number up online, but it really annoys me to lose things like that. Of course, I NEVER lose stuff. Not ME.  

And I was already irate because I had all these damned meetings all set up and everything arranged for the fall semester and most of next spring, and of course New Boss has to have a number of them changed because she isn’t going to be in town when we have them scheduled. Have I mentioned how much I hate scheduling/organizing meetings??? And how I think it shouldn’t be part of my job anyway so I get even more annoyed?? And suddenly nothing is available at all in the Student Union, for any of the days we need one big room for an hour. I find that very odd. There is a new person doing the room schedules over there who used to work here in our office. I never had a bit of trouble scheduling rooms until she moved over there. I am finding this one particularly fishy because it’s just one room, for an hour, 5:00-6:00, in November. How could it not EVER be available?? And I’ve always had a perfectly friendly, normal relationship with this person. I can’t imagine why she’d lie to me about the rooms, but it’s pretty strange and suspicious. And she was pretty weird. K didn’t find it beyond the realm of possibility.  

So, it’s just one more insane thing to deal with! Kind of like the woman who called me today about her license. She started out by telling me that she didn’t send her forms and fee to me for her license because she’d gotten married and wanted to wait till her name was changed. And then she wants to know why she doesn’t have her license yet. Ummmmm…. probably because you didn’t send the forms, I tell her.  And then she says she just doesn’t know how she was supposed to know she needed to send in the forms for her license. Nobody told her she had to do that! Yet, she didn’t send them because she was waiting to get her name changed. But she didn’t know she had to. But she was waiting till her name was changed. It’s like working with really really crazy people. Or being in some alternate reality.

AND there was the guy who called needing me to mail him a copy of his program of study, since he’s lost it.  And I’m pretty certain I’ve mailed him one copy already, as he has an unusual name. So I guess he lost that one too.  He asked if I could mail it to a lodge in Linville, and says, "Do you know where that lodge is?"

Well, no, I don’t, but amazingly enough I can actually send things to you through the mail even if I have no idea where you are! I just put it in a box here, and it appears in your box in a couple of days – it’s like magic! Of course he also didn’t know his zip code, and hinted around hoping I’d look it up for him. I told him to call me back when he figured it out. And he did.

AND the guy who came in yesterday with his application to have his transcripts reviewed. He handed it to me, and on the "what area do you want to teach?" line he’d just put 9-12. I said, "What subject do you want to teach?" He says, "I didn’t know what to put there!" I said, "Okay, you’ve got to know what you want us to do the evaluation in before we can actually do it." He says, "I know what I want to teach, but I didn’t know what to put there!" At that point I’m just kind of staring at him. I finally manage to get him to wrap his brain around the idea that we really need to know what he’s going to teach EXACTLY before we can tell him what classes he needs to teach it, and he lets me know that he wants to teach English. I sure hope he doesn’t end up teaching Communications.

Baker B was there at the time, waiting on me – I was about to be late for a dentist appointment and really didn’t have time for the dimwitted – and we both were reminded very much of Ricky in Trailer Park Boys, without the swearing and the cigarettes. And presumably without the handgun. "For fuck sake, you can fuck off with your big fucking book-learning ways of saying things and your fancy line-filling-out-things – you know I didn’t get my fucking Grade 10!!!" Even better, he doesn’t currently have an address  ("I live in Julian’s grandmother’s car, can’t you just fucking send it there???") and wanted me to call him later and get his address when he actually has one. Ummm…. no. YOU call or email ME when you finally have a home, dude.

 Oh, look, it’s time to go home and all I’ve done is whine about my job – as usual! How about some Cass, West Virginia photos to end on –

Cass is just a big train station and a bunch of weird little houses now. At one time it was a big lumber town, hence the company houses. Now you can take scenic train rides, although we never have. And the train station/store is HUGE.

You can actually rent these houses by the night or week – we started to do that, but nothing was available while we were there. There’s also NOTHING to do in Cass, other than walk around the teeny town and ride the expensive train, so it’s probably just as well.

There were a ZILLION of them, and a lot of them weren’t restored. Of course, those are my favorites.

And there was this really neat old building that used to be – I think – a school. They’ve torn down part of it, or something that was attached to it –

I’ve got pictures somewhere of this last time we were there- probably 4 or 5 years ago – and I need to dig them out and see what it was they tore down. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t like this last time.