happy friday, and lomos finally

What a long week. The Office of The Perpetual Turmoil has now been told that we won’t be getting any extra help, because we’re… ummm… too busy. Yes, the Dean informed everyone that since Dr. Airhead is resigning and we’ll be getting a new boss (a horror too terrifying to contemplate right now), and it’s the busiest time of the year for us, he’s putting off the new person until we get reorganized and figure out what it is exactly we’re doing. And yes, that does make sense. And yes, that is exactly what K and I said needed to be done to begin with – figuring out precisely what the new person would do and what we would be doing. Create a job with defined roles, say. But, no, nobody wanted to go out on a limb and figure out how to restructure our office so it actually makes some sense, so they posted the job as a compilation of the five distinct jobs that K and I do at our low pay grade, and naturally only two people on campus even applied. Now it’s being put off, they’ll restructure the office and repost the job.

That is exactly what should have been done to begin with. I said before we posted it that one person needs to do student teaching, that it’s a full-time job all by itself, and it’s insane to have it combined with licensure and certification stuff and all the other ten zillion jobs I do. Of course Dr. Airhead didn’t like that, because I also said I didn’t want to do it anymore, that I’m beyond sick of it and I’d MUCH rather do licensure stuff. Then when the big bruhaha occurred and he put in his resignation, suddenly having one person do student teaching is a great idea. Because now he doesn’t care if it’s not me doing it. (He cared before because I’ve been doing it – and everything else – for five years, so even though it was driving me to an early grave, things always got done and at least appeared to go smoothly. If the new person took it over, it wouldn’t go smoothly for awhile and he HATES things not going smoothly.)

So now he keeps flapping around telling me that we ARE getting another person EVENTUALLY and it will be much much better to wait and figure out what exactly their job will be and that we’ve got to move all the student teaching stuff over to one person because that makes sense and then I’ll have way less to do myself. Well, DUH. I finally told him today that I do understand that, and I totally agree that it’s best to wait until his replacement is found and the office is restructured, but what THEY have to understand is that I’m doing three people’s jobs right now and no matter how much better it will be later, it’s not doing me one bit of good now and he and the dean will just have to understand that I can only do twelve things at a time so they better not be holding their breaths on stuff like the (already overdue) Annual Report and the ghastly overrun travel budget that I can’t get logged in to see exactly how far we ARE over. Because I’m too busy dealing with student teaching and licensure and certification.

Why am I talking about this at 2:30 in the morning on a Friday? Or Saturday, or whatever it is??? Apparently I want to be sure I lie awake worrying all night. On the plus side, I hired a new student yesterday. My one that I had for the past year and a half just vanished. She had some serious family problems at the end of this past semester, and missed the last couple of weeks because she went home, and then she came back during exams for one day, said she’d be in the next day, and never came back. Over the past six months or so she’s had an amazing number of crisis’ (crici??) causing her to miss work and not be able to call and say she wasn’t coming in, like a grandmother with a broken hip, a sister in a car wreck, a friend in a motorcycle wreck, a sister with food poisoning, etc etc etc, so I’m not sure what really happened.  She had told me earlier she’d work this summer – she graduates in August – then when I asked her about her schedule  that day she did turn up, she said she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to work after all because she was taking two summer classes and has an internship too. But she’d let me know! Then she vanished and never answered my emails. Marg will probably laugh at that . Or cry. 

So although I didn’t want to give her job away, I ended up having to. One of our supervisors just happened to mention that her son is transferring here from Western and was having no luck finding a job. So I ended up hiring him. I gave my usual scattered attention-deficit-disorder interview where I forgot to tell him major things like how much it pays, and concentrated on things like how it probably looks more awful and chaotic than it is, although right now it IS pretty chaotic but it’s not so bad, it’s really good experience in office work.. ramble, ramble, ramble. He looked kind of shell-shocked but still wanted the job (after asking, "so, what does this office actually do?"  – another major point I’d left out while talking to him). I didn’t even realize classes were starting again Monday – I thought we had another week. So when he said he’d be back on Monday, I said, "oh my god, are classes starting MONDAY???" I’m always very surprised when people actually want to work for me, especially after interviews like that. And this is the first boy we’ve had in all my five years – we always have girls, and they are usually elementary education majors. Because we usually get people word-of-mouth. The good thing is that he’s just a sophomore, so if I don’t drive him away with chaos, he won’t graduate for a couple of years.

Okay, it’s nearly THREE IN THE MORNING and I HAVE TO GO TO BED. But first, some Lomos! These are all Helen, at night. There’s a nearly hidden Baker B on the far right side of the first one.