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Saturday, December 7, 2002

In further wildly boring work-related whining, Friday was even worse than Wednesday and Thursday, because the registration system finally came back up sometime Thursday night, and lo, there was a vast whooosh as those students who were on line at the time hoovered up all the remaining seats, and Friday was one endless line of panicked and tearful kids who couldn't get into any of the courses they wanted, and who needed to rebuild their spring semester schedules from the ground up, with extensive coaching and encouragement. I was able to pull some strings and finesse a few permission numbers here and there, but essentially it was one long exercise in damage control and emotional-crisis management, interrupted only by those stroll-in students who always turn up at the very end of registration with no earthly idea of what they want to take and expect me to walk them through the entire course schedule.

I did, to my small credit, manage to make it through the whole week without losing my temper with anyone. Today, alas, I'm compensating by making a horse's ass of myself in various list posts, and I now need to back slowly away from the computer and go vacuum or something. Note to self: whenever you think there's a burning need for you to pontificate weightily on some topic? There actually isn't. Trust me on this. Put a cork in it, and keep it there.

Posted @ 11:49 AM CST [Link]5 comments

Thursday, December 5, 2002

So I knew this was going to be a brutal week, since the university's powers-that-be, for no explicable reason, decided to twiddle the registration queue so that almost all our students were registering in this single five-day span (instead of spread across two and a half weeks as in the past). What none of us knew, of course, was that this was also the week that the registration-system server would choose to go down with a calamitous case of the vapors that has rendered it essentially inoperable for two days now. Which means that for the past two days my life has consisted of repeating over and over the following sentences:

No, the system is down.
No, it's not just you.
No, it won't help to try it on my computer.
No, you can't register until it's running again.
No, I don't know when that will be.
No, there's nothing I can do about it.
Listen, kid, if I could do anything about it, I'd be working for tech services, making quite a bit more than I currently am, and would not have to deal with the emotional crises of two hundred snivelling undergraduates.

No, I didn't really say that last one. Though I have, once or twice, when pushed beyond restraint, busted out the famous Geezer Rant: "Look, I know this is a pain, but hey! In MY day, registration meant standing in line for two hours in the basement of Johnston Hall! Oh yes! Sweating like a pig in your winter coat, lugging all your books and schedules and course guides! Not knowing if any of the courses you wanted still had seats left! And when you finally, after two hours, got to the head of the line, if your courses didn't have seats left, you damn well had to be ready with plan B, plan C, and maybe plan W, because if you didn't have alternatives to give RIGHT NOW to the nice arthritic little old ladies pulling cards out of the bin, you'd go BACK to the end of the two-hour line and stand for ANOTHER two hours, in your winter coat, sweating like a pig! Instead of which, YOU get to sit in comfort in front of your computer, hitting reload for two hours, right, but at least you're sitting down and listening to whatever stupid music you kids listen to these days and eating chips! And drinking a nice cold beverage! Which I can't even drink one of because I have to be careful about my liquids intake because I can't even get away from my DESK long enough to go to the friggin' BATHROOM! All RIGHT? Now SETTLE DOWN!"

Also? It is cold here. We didn't get the storm that hammered the eastern seaboard, but we got the nice razor-sharp Canadian high-pressure front, and this morning it was 4 above zero as I walked to the bus stop, in the dark, on my way to a rousing day of dealing with two hundred undergraduate nervous breakdowns.

I am, let us say, ready for the weekend.

Posted @ 09:07 PM CST [Link]4 comments

Sunday, December 1, 2002

Argh. Self-absorbed tedious writing blather follows, which is in fact so mortifyingly self-absorbed that I've put it on cutaway. [more]

Posted by jones059 @ 01:27 PM CST [Link]6 comments