Stuff

Its almost the end of the second week of classes, and things are at their usual chaotic best. I have a lab class in the teaching lab outside of my office every semester. Its a fun course, but the prof who teaches spring semester is a little disorganized, and somehow can't understand that if he changes his lesson plan without telling me, I'm not going to have the stuff he wants to use for class set up in time for his lab.

It's also time to elect a new Chairman for the next four years. Usually, this is a simple process. This year, the current chair first had to have the faculty approve the ballot and the voting rules (the ballot has four check boxes, one for each of the two candidate, one for write ins and one for abstentions, and the voting rules are actually spelled out in the Dept's bylaws), and then decided that the faculty would have to vote on when to hold the election. Of course, at the meeting where they were supposed to confirm the date, they didn't get around to any of the agenda items because they spent the whole meeting discussing one of our undergrads, who had returned to school to finish her degree, and is caring for her new baby during class (she does leave the room when it gets noisy or disruptive). The next faculty meeting is in two weeks, so hopefully they'll pick a date then. Then the fun starts. There are partisan politics problems with this vote, as our departmental secretary is good friends with one of the candidates. This lead to me building a new ballot box that locks (two padlocks in fact, and requires two people - her and me - to open), and setting up to have the dean's office certify the vote count.

Meanwhile, teeka has finally realized that her current job is steadily driving her closer and closer to a complete breakdown. When I came home yesterday, she came back from snakewyfe's house and asked me if it was OK for her to quit. This isn't the first time we've talked about it, and I know her job is driving her crazy, so I told her it was all right with me, but that I'd prefer she have a new job lined up before she quits. teeka's the kind of person who will give extreme loyalty to a job, even if sometimes it means that she keeps at it long after she should have quit, which is part of the problem with this job. She really likes the 'working with students' parts of the job, but the office politics and the attitudes of the faculty (which basically translate to administrative staff being the faculty's personal secretaries, even if it means that the admin people don't get their own jobs done because of faculty demands) are, from everything I've heard her tell, really, really not fun. Everything I've heard leads me to believe its an institutional problem in the College of Letters & Sciences, and makes me happy that the College of Engineering is a much friendlier place, where everyone at least somewhat believes that the admin staff really do run things, and we can tell the faculty to go away because we're busy, and they frequently do.

I've got all of my admin staff working (at least a little) on trying to help teeka find another job not in her current school, and I hope that goes well. She's also looking off-campus at retail jobs (bookstores, fabric/craft stores, etc.). I hope she finds something she likes.