just another day at the stark raving madhouse

And by "another day" I mean another week, but it’s been so grueling that I can’t remember further back than today. Which  was the perfect grueling cap to a grueling week. Oh, and it’s not over yet, despite it being Friday!  I have to work graduation. Which is Sunday. Starting at the outlandish hour of 7:00. In the morning. Which is generally when I’m slapping at the alarm to shut it up on a workday.  

We’ve always had our graduation on Saturday, which is bad enough, but apparently some of the other colleges were getting jealous of our prime spot and now we have to rotate. Damn you, Arts and Sciences!

So today was entirely spent in graduation preparations. Which meant K, J and I sat around at the convocation center from nine till eleven, listening to the associate dean giving instructions to the junior marshals and bitching quietly to one another. And contemplating how much work we needed to be doing back at the office.  In the past, we’ve at least moved chairs around and taped signs to seats, but since two or three colleges are having their graduations before ours, of course we couldn’t actually do anything to set up today. So why were we there? Who knows!!

At eleven I left to take Colfax to the vet. She is feeling much better, and eating very well, but is still having to have fluids maybe once a week to keep her from getting dehydrated. And she’s still anemic. The vet is five or six miles from our house in the opposite direction of the university, so that took a chunk of time. Naturally, when I get back to the office yet another crisis has erupted. There’s a problem with the programs. Apparently Dr. Airhead’s wife has decided fairly suddenly to retire. The reports are mixed on what really happened, but either she didn’t give the dean much warning or she did give him warning and he didn’t see the resignation letter so just found out. Today. Retiring faculty are always listed with a little write-up in the programs. It would be very insulting to her to not list her in the program. Which is already printed. So the fix was to have the campus print shop print up a little insert to put into the 2,500 programs.

But the insert can’t just be stuck into the programs. Because having inserts stuck into programs would mean that after our graduation is done on Sunday, there will be 2,500 little inserts all over the convocation center, and the Graduate School’s graduation is immediately following ours, and there isn’t going to be time to pick up 2,500 little inserts. So they have to be attached to the program. And it has to look very very nice, and not tacky and like something that was just stuck in at the last minute. Like it was.

So the solution is to take double-sided tape, cut off an inch-long piece (this was calculated in an effort to figure out how much double-sided tape to buy from Staples. Or, shall we say, miscalculated.) stick the double-sided tape very carefully onto the back cover page of the program, take the insert, line it up very very carefully with the type on the opposite page, and stick it down. And then do that 2,499 more times.

And since nobody realized this needed to be done until noon or so, it was 4:00 before the inserts were printed and we could actually start sticking them in. And naturally Insane Boss is feeling all threatened by the Associate Dean commandeering us for all this silly graduation stuff, and has to assert her own power by not letting J help out. Because J had to work on stuff for her. Like our Annual Report which isn’t due for weeks. There’s nothing like office power struggles.

And I’ll just note here because I’m too tired to note it anywhere that it would make more sense – Insane Boss is growing more insane with each passing day. And more maddening. We’ve found out that she told the Dean our office is screwed up because of J. That everything that’s gone wrong is J’s fault. Which is, yes, insane. She told J that I was waiting on her for the Annual Report – that I’ve done everything and her part is all that’s left. Which is totally untrue- I’m still working on the big huge piece of it that I was working on week before last. It’s nowhere NEAR done. She’s obviously got it in for J, and is trying to make her quit. Because she’s insane!!! And she kept trying to lure me away from program-insert-fixing by calling me into her office to discuss posting grades. Which she insists I have the power to do, when I am 99% sure that I do not. But her last assistant had the power to post grades, so if she needed grades posted, she’d just call up that assistant and she’d post them. So I must have that power too. Because she needs me to do it for her so I must be able to do it. 

And she was getting decidedly snippy with me when I was telling her that I’m pretty certain I don’t have authorization to post grades. Since there’s no reason for me to have authorization to post grades. And I’m not too sure how comfortable I am posting grades, either, if I do for some bizarre reason have authorization. Which I don’t. But if I can’t do it, and she’s SURE I can, I’ll just have to run them over to the registrar’s office for her Monday and get them to do it!

Yeah, basically she’d have us breathing for her if we could.

But back to the inserts. SO we taped and we inserted and we taped and we inserted and there were several other people helping us tape and insert and we taped and inserted and taped and inserted. And then of course we ran out of double sided tape. So we started using whatever we could find, which was mostly that really weird thick double-sided stuff you stick things on walls with, which someone had quite a bit of to use on bulletin boards. We couldn’t use glue or staples or rubber cement because that would look tacky. But weird thick stuff that you stick things to walls with was fine! Well, whatever, we cut it in teeny strips and it wasn’t TOO bad.

We were there till seven o’clock. But those inserts won’t fall out and be all over the convocation center when the Graduate School is trying to start their graduation! Maybe.

One day I really am going to write about something besides my job.