these things are sent to try us
Spent the weekend mostly working, what with email catchup and exam committee checking, because the one thing that reg/orientation season absolutely needs is a board schedule in the middle of it, amirite? But we have to code students whose deferred exam results came out on Friday and affected their graduation/continuation status, which would have been slightly easier if half the departments had put the marks up on schedule, which they didn't, so I need to carve an hour out of my morning to check them all manually. Honestly, I think the administrative rot has really set in to my Cherished Institution. Next up in the administrative nightmares: venue clashes (parents' orientation is squatting on the good ones), handbook errors (rife) and another round of arguing info talk recording with academics.
Oh, and to assist in all of the above: my computer slowed to a crawl, hung and crashed completely within three days of me returning to work at the start of this year, necessitating me stuffing it in the car and taking it down to the IT department after they spent three days neglecting to fetch it. Complete hard-drive wipe and reinstall, "probably malware" but they didn't seem too sure, lost a decade's worth of archive which is only mostly backed up. Oh, and lost a week of orientation prep time because no computer, and my netbook, while gallant, is small and slow. So this morning there was a cold, sinking feeling when I tried to log in and everything slowed down, tried to reinstall Office, stuffed around intermittently for half an hour with lots of meditative pauses, and then froze terminally. Switching it off and pointedly leaving it for an hour seems to have mostly sorted things out, but the new Office install seems to have sneakily uninstalled Firefox, which narks me more than somewhat. Also, there is no fury like a harried administrator who has specifically arrived on campus at 6am to sort things out before reg at 8, and can't do a thing for 90 minutes because of computer crashes. Homicidal doesn't begin to cover it.
Also, the strained ankle tendon which I stuffed at Grahamstown last year and which has been slowly recovering, really doesn't like all this harried running around and is flaring up again in the teeth of orthotics. On the upside, it seems madly appropriate to be stomping around in boots rather than sandals despite the weather. Things may need kicking.
I have the impression that the universe is really trying to tell me something with this reg season. Namely: be anywhere else but here.
This entry was originally posted at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/972706.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Oh, and to assist in all of the above: my computer slowed to a crawl, hung and crashed completely within three days of me returning to work at the start of this year, necessitating me stuffing it in the car and taking it down to the IT department after they spent three days neglecting to fetch it. Complete hard-drive wipe and reinstall, "probably malware" but they didn't seem too sure, lost a decade's worth of archive which is only mostly backed up. Oh, and lost a week of orientation prep time because no computer, and my netbook, while gallant, is small and slow. So this morning there was a cold, sinking feeling when I tried to log in and everything slowed down, tried to reinstall Office, stuffed around intermittently for half an hour with lots of meditative pauses, and then froze terminally. Switching it off and pointedly leaving it for an hour seems to have mostly sorted things out, but the new Office install seems to have sneakily uninstalled Firefox, which narks me more than somewhat. Also, there is no fury like a harried administrator who has specifically arrived on campus at 6am to sort things out before reg at 8, and can't do a thing for 90 minutes because of computer crashes. Homicidal doesn't begin to cover it.
Also, the strained ankle tendon which I stuffed at Grahamstown last year and which has been slowly recovering, really doesn't like all this harried running around and is flaring up again in the teeth of orthotics. On the upside, it seems madly appropriate to be stomping around in boots rather than sandals despite the weather. Things may need kicking.
I have the impression that the universe is really trying to tell me something with this reg season. Namely: be anywhere else but here.
This entry was originally posted at https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/972706.html. Please comment there using OpenID.