dear life, be better!
Ugh, you guys. Work is fucking KILLING MY SOUL.
My story isn't actually that exciting, I'm just feeling very overwhelmed at work for the past, oh, three weeks or so, and it's definitely been wearing on me. I know I owe people here stuff. I'm supposed to beta someone's rpf big bang, and beta another something for someone else, and write my Donors Choose auction fic, and work on my Queen Bitch fic. And believe me, I WISH I WAS DOING THOSE THINGS, but instead I'm just working constantly from 7:30AM until 5PM because I'm staying late and not taking lunch because I have so fucking much to do, and yes. Ugh.
Now, if I were like, a lawyer or someone with an actually important job who made more than $30k a year, my schedule would probably seem light. I'm not so much complaining about the hours, or even being constantly busy with too many things to actually keep track of; I'm more annoyed that I really don't get paid enough for all the work I do, especially since I am basically doing someone else's job in addition to my own.
For those of you who don't know, I work in the English department at UT Austin. I am the web content manager, I'm the coordinator for the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies aka TILTS (this year's theme: Renaissance brutality/murder/torture, and no, I'm not kidding, it's all heads on spikes, for shizzle in the hizzle), and I have a bunch of other administrative duties, like faculty sick leave, time sheet processing, ordering supplies, recruitment travel, blah blah.
So that is my job, and it keeps me fairly busy unless it's the summer, when everything is slow. But right now, shit at my job is actually speeding up very quickly because the Renaissance thing is accepting proposals for their Spring Symposium and their Odyssey course, which is a lecture series that people pay to attend, is about to start next week, and the folks for next year's theme (Digital Humanities, whatever that is) are beginning to plan, which means processing reimbursements for them from their research funds, etc etc. Also, I had to build Renaissance an entire website within the confines of the English department website while they wait for ITS to build them a REAL website, plus I've been doing all the updates for the undergrad and graduate advising because the girl who used to do theirs left to go back to school and the new chick doesn't know how to use Cascade yet. AND ITS is switching our entire site over to a new template and a new version of Cascade over the next few weeks as well, so I've been having meetings with them to work out those details and OMG I HATE CASCADE ARG ARG ARG.
Anyway, so my job? Already busy. But then the faculty liason chick (let's call her FLC) decided that SHE was so busy getting together the shit for the 3 promotion cases the department has this year that she couldn't do anything else, so my supervisor decided to have ME do 80% of FLC's job for her. Which means that over the past month I've been assigned to collect, organize, and process: 2 different grant applications from 10 different people, faculty annual reports from all 80 department faculty (each report has 3 pieces minimum) some of whom are on leave out of the country, and the big one--post tenure review.
Post tenure review is HUGE. It's monster. It involves so much information on each faculty member being reviewed, and it involves information from the past 6 years. 6 years' worth of annual reports, course instructor surveys, student comments, publications, career narrative, CVs, and... I'm sure there's more. It's a LOT of stuff. And there are 10 people up for review. 2 of them are ON LEAVE, which means getting their stuff is like hoping that just this once, Oscar will come out of his trashcan in a good mood. I have to collect everything in paper format, and then SCAN IT ALL in individual files and turn it all into pdfs.
So, I'm doing all this and hunting down faculty who haven't turned in their reports and updating three different websites plus my normal job plus TILTS... and meanwhile FLC is having long chats with Last Year's Girl in her office and looking at funny webpages with her. Because promotions were due a week and a half ago! So she's done with her one thing (which wasn't that big a deal to be honest, not nearly as much stuff as post-tenure review with less people who are a lot more motivated to get shit in because it's PROMOTIONS) and I'm still doing 80% of her job and getting paid less, too.
Meanwhile, the College is forcing the department chair to give faculty merit raises even though we're on a pay freeze and the Chair doesn't think faculty should take even merit raises in a year when staff aren't getting any. (Our Chair is awesome, seriously. I love her.) But the College has decided that merit should be determined via some sort of cohort system of our own devising, and also we need to adjust for gender equity. So all the work we did in the spring creating a ranking system for salary? Gone. I spent an hour today changing all the faculty CVs I have thankfully saved on my computer into pdfs and uploading them onto a webspace for review by the Chair and her merit raise committee people over the weekend.
OMG this post sucks. Okay, here's the good part. RIGHT HERE!! SCROLL SCROLL UNTIL YOU GET HERE!! Are you here? Okay good. The most depressing part of my day was getting done with work (late) and going to the gym to play racquetball. First we had to kick people off our court, which involved a trip to the front desk to determine who had the court reserved, and then I only got to play for like 40 minutes before Matt was like, "Okay, I have to go now."
This was disappointing because a) I was just getting started and b) this is the first time since Matt returned from his summer internship in Chicago in early August that we actually have played, because he kept ditching me at the last second. On our way out, he told me that he took a lot of shit for coming to play racquetball with me in the first place, and I was like, "What? Why??"
Turns out his girlfriend is not so much a fan of the whole thing, although I'm not sure if it's that he's spending time "alone" with me, or if it's just that it's taking time away from her. And the thing is, I like his girlfriend. But I also like having my friend and being able to spend time with him even if she's not interested in what we're doing. We had dinner earlier in the week and I was kind of hoping to talk to him about the person I may or may not ~like, but he brought her along so I didn't really feel comfortable talking about personal stuff around her. (I like her, but I don't know her that well, and just... yeah. Didn't feel right.)
So anyway, that was lamecakes. And then the bus didn't come for 30 minutes and I got home just in time for Dollhouse and I didn't get to plan my TV podcast thing at all this week because I got home and just fucking crashed. I'm so drained, you guys. There's way too much shit going on. I like my life to be boring. I can only handle one exciting thing at a time, and right now everything is WAY too exciting.
Dear Life-
Please to be getting better, and also to be calming the fuck down. I know you're excited and Imma let you finish, but Andrea had one of the worst weeks ever, and now she's talking about herself in the third person.
Never a good sign.
no love-
Me
PS - Make something awesome happen this weekend, and forgiveness is in your grasp. Free tickets to Fame would be nice, just for example.
My story isn't actually that exciting, I'm just feeling very overwhelmed at work for the past, oh, three weeks or so, and it's definitely been wearing on me. I know I owe people here stuff. I'm supposed to beta someone's rpf big bang, and beta another something for someone else, and write my Donors Choose auction fic, and work on my Queen Bitch fic. And believe me, I WISH I WAS DOING THOSE THINGS, but instead I'm just working constantly from 7:30AM until 5PM because I'm staying late and not taking lunch because I have so fucking much to do, and yes. Ugh.
Now, if I were like, a lawyer or someone with an actually important job who made more than $30k a year, my schedule would probably seem light. I'm not so much complaining about the hours, or even being constantly busy with too many things to actually keep track of; I'm more annoyed that I really don't get paid enough for all the work I do, especially since I am basically doing someone else's job in addition to my own.
For those of you who don't know, I work in the English department at UT Austin. I am the web content manager, I'm the coordinator for the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies aka TILTS (this year's theme: Renaissance brutality/murder/torture, and no, I'm not kidding, it's all heads on spikes, for shizzle in the hizzle), and I have a bunch of other administrative duties, like faculty sick leave, time sheet processing, ordering supplies, recruitment travel, blah blah.
So that is my job, and it keeps me fairly busy unless it's the summer, when everything is slow. But right now, shit at my job is actually speeding up very quickly because the Renaissance thing is accepting proposals for their Spring Symposium and their Odyssey course, which is a lecture series that people pay to attend, is about to start next week, and the folks for next year's theme (Digital Humanities, whatever that is) are beginning to plan, which means processing reimbursements for them from their research funds, etc etc. Also, I had to build Renaissance an entire website within the confines of the English department website while they wait for ITS to build them a REAL website, plus I've been doing all the updates for the undergrad and graduate advising because the girl who used to do theirs left to go back to school and the new chick doesn't know how to use Cascade yet. AND ITS is switching our entire site over to a new template and a new version of Cascade over the next few weeks as well, so I've been having meetings with them to work out those details and OMG I HATE CASCADE ARG ARG ARG.
Anyway, so my job? Already busy. But then the faculty liason chick (let's call her FLC) decided that SHE was so busy getting together the shit for the 3 promotion cases the department has this year that she couldn't do anything else, so my supervisor decided to have ME do 80% of FLC's job for her. Which means that over the past month I've been assigned to collect, organize, and process: 2 different grant applications from 10 different people, faculty annual reports from all 80 department faculty (each report has 3 pieces minimum) some of whom are on leave out of the country, and the big one--post tenure review.
Post tenure review is HUGE. It's monster. It involves so much information on each faculty member being reviewed, and it involves information from the past 6 years. 6 years' worth of annual reports, course instructor surveys, student comments, publications, career narrative, CVs, and... I'm sure there's more. It's a LOT of stuff. And there are 10 people up for review. 2 of them are ON LEAVE, which means getting their stuff is like hoping that just this once, Oscar will come out of his trashcan in a good mood. I have to collect everything in paper format, and then SCAN IT ALL in individual files and turn it all into pdfs.
So, I'm doing all this and hunting down faculty who haven't turned in their reports and updating three different websites plus my normal job plus TILTS... and meanwhile FLC is having long chats with Last Year's Girl in her office and looking at funny webpages with her. Because promotions were due a week and a half ago! So she's done with her one thing (which wasn't that big a deal to be honest, not nearly as much stuff as post-tenure review with less people who are a lot more motivated to get shit in because it's PROMOTIONS) and I'm still doing 80% of her job and getting paid less, too.
Meanwhile, the College is forcing the department chair to give faculty merit raises even though we're on a pay freeze and the Chair doesn't think faculty should take even merit raises in a year when staff aren't getting any. (Our Chair is awesome, seriously. I love her.) But the College has decided that merit should be determined via some sort of cohort system of our own devising, and also we need to adjust for gender equity. So all the work we did in the spring creating a ranking system for salary? Gone. I spent an hour today changing all the faculty CVs I have thankfully saved on my computer into pdfs and uploading them onto a webspace for review by the Chair and her merit raise committee people over the weekend.
OMG this post sucks. Okay, here's the good part. RIGHT HERE!! SCROLL SCROLL UNTIL YOU GET HERE!! Are you here? Okay good. The most depressing part of my day was getting done with work (late) and going to the gym to play racquetball. First we had to kick people off our court, which involved a trip to the front desk to determine who had the court reserved, and then I only got to play for like 40 minutes before Matt was like, "Okay, I have to go now."
This was disappointing because a) I was just getting started and b) this is the first time since Matt returned from his summer internship in Chicago in early August that we actually have played, because he kept ditching me at the last second. On our way out, he told me that he took a lot of shit for coming to play racquetball with me in the first place, and I was like, "What? Why??"
Turns out his girlfriend is not so much a fan of the whole thing, although I'm not sure if it's that he's spending time "alone" with me, or if it's just that it's taking time away from her. And the thing is, I like his girlfriend. But I also like having my friend and being able to spend time with him even if she's not interested in what we're doing. We had dinner earlier in the week and I was kind of hoping to talk to him about the person I may or may not ~like, but he brought her along so I didn't really feel comfortable talking about personal stuff around her. (I like her, but I don't know her that well, and just... yeah. Didn't feel right.)
So anyway, that was lamecakes. And then the bus didn't come for 30 minutes and I got home just in time for Dollhouse and I didn't get to plan my TV podcast thing at all this week because I got home and just fucking crashed. I'm so drained, you guys. There's way too much shit going on. I like my life to be boring. I can only handle one exciting thing at a time, and right now everything is WAY too exciting.
Dear Life-
Please to be getting better, and also to be calming the fuck down. I know you're excited and Imma let you finish, but Andrea had one of the worst weeks ever, and now she's talking about herself in the third person.
Never a good sign.
no love-
Me
PS - Make something awesome happen this weekend, and forgiveness is in your grasp. Free tickets to Fame would be nice, just for example.