- No matter how organised you are and how much forethought and planning you show, the bulk of your time will be spent waiting for other people to do their necessary bit.
- Corollary: my Cherished Institution is a particularly slow and inefficient bureaucracy with, at present, really poor leadership, I am beyond tired at negotiating Academic Life Under COVID perpetually on the back foot.
- Further corollary: the remote reg infrastructure has been cobbled together under pressure and inadequately tested, and is buggy as all get-out.
- Translating a registration process to remote format is actually about tech support.
- Corollary: students and academics require approximately the same amount of tech support, and are equally prone to simply not reading instructions.
- Further corollary: tech support people really do say "Have you tried turning it off and on again" before they say anything else. As a reluctant and inadvertent tech support person I have a cut-and-paste paragraph for "Please exit the service request and, when you re-enter, click once and wait rather than clicking multiple times."
- Really annoying corollary: students apparently do not understand folder structures and will email incessantly about not being able to see the file because they have not clicked on the subfolder.
- 11-hour work days in 7-day work weeks are actually a lot easier when you can do them from home.
- Zelda is very soothing to the soul, even in its current strict one-hour-a-day ration for unwinding purposes, and even though IANACG and am still very bad at the timed and dexterity challenges.
- Teams meetings are still exhausting but are somewhat leavened by the moment's amusement when Pandora is loudly and volubly sick in the background while I'm running training. I am unsure of the etiquette here, Emily Post, I laughed and apologised: should I have rather politely pretended it wasn't happening?
- The three-week period in which I heavily tranquilise myself in order to survive the double gut-punch of orientation and registration is even more essential under remote conditions, consolations of working from home notwithstanding. The gentle muting Trepiline perfoms on my emotional reactions is essential in the not-ripping-heads-off-idiots stakes, and also gives me blissful insomnia-free eight-hour nights when I sleep like the dead. Better living through chemistry.
- COVID has underlined the vague sense reg always gives me: hell I'm good at this. I have wrestled, and am wrestling, these giant unwieldy processes into something like functionality through sheer bloody-mindedness, structural thinking and main force. My parts are going well. The bits out of my control, not so much. It's an impossible job, which makes it take a little longer, is all.
This entry has been crossposted from my Dreamwidth blog at
https://freckles-and-doubt.dreamwidth.org/. The comment action is all over there, and supports
OpenID.