Hildegarde

Okay, this isgoing to be short.  I was supposed to be writing this at eleven o’clock in the morning in a nice computer lab on the same floor where I teach, but I’m beginning to wonder if incompetent nutsiness is some kind of virus that’s catching.

Back up a little and look at last week, when, during my first class of the term, it turned out that our room had also been assigned to another class for the same time. Then we were told to use a room on the first floor, which turned out not to be a classroom at all but the Writing  Center, which is the place students go for tutoring. The tutors, obviously, objected.    We were then moved across campus to another building, but only for the single session.  The session after that, we were moved yet again to yet another building.  Why couldn’t we have stayed in what was a perfectly adequate and perfectly empty classroom from the first day?  If you figure that out, get back to me.

But really, that day was better than this one, by miles.  You have to understand that one of the buildings on this campus is actually used by three different divisions of the same university system, which explains why, when I showed up today, the room where I  was supposed to teach was locked.

This was on order of one of the other divisions, the one that technically has responsibility for that particular room, and the teacher who taught in that room before me made a  BIG play of locking the door behind him when he left–nope, nobody uses the room without getting a digital key from the division in question, which can only be had by walking halfway across campus to yet another building where that division has its offices.

And the computer lab?  Nope.   Open to that division and its students only.  How about the cmputer at the desk in the classroom?  Nope again, only accessible with a special code only given out to that division and its students…

And on and on and on.  I ended up sitting on a floor in a hallway trying to access and send e-mail from my cell phone, which aside from being expensive isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  In other words, the experience sucked dead rats.

If I’d had access to weapons and the personnel in charge of all this, there would have been dead people.  I taught through a haze of frustration and anger that couldn’t have helped my delivery any, and I came home as exhausted as if I’d been cross country skiing.

No, cross country skiing is relaxing.  Or it used to be.

Somewhere on this campus, there are people getting paid a lot of money to “manage” all this.

I think  I know where we could make some targetted budget cuts in case the financial crisis starts to hit home…