would you like a little whine with that???

Agggghhh. Sorry to not read, not note, not write, and then show up whining. Especially since – as I keep reminding myself – I like my job now. I like my job I like my job I like my job!!!

Well, we’re all exhausted and whiny at this point. Thank you, Satan’s Own Computer System From Hell!!! According to D, usually our office has everything wrapped up by early December and everyone with the vacation time leaves early for Christmas. Not this year. There was some doubt as to whether we’d even be able to take all our Christmas vacation this year. So I better be grateful that I won’t be here next week. I hope. Unless more disasters hit.

Right now I’m taking an early lunch and am in the library. Because all three of us are taking simultaneous lunches instead of our usual staggered lunch breaks, so that we can all be there together to work on clearing seniors. Who technically graduated last week but we’re still trying to figure out did they REALLY graduate, or did they fail stuff or are they missing stuff. Apparently on the old computer system (which I just loathed, calling it outdated and awkward and user-unfriendly, as it was just a step up from DOS) figured most of this out on its own and checking the seniors out was a breeze. Now it’s check, check, check, try 14 different screens, realize some of them aren’t agreeing with others of them, try to figure out what the discrepancy is, check some more, realize something isn’t carrying over to somewhere else, panic, call the registrar’s office, get voicemail because nobody’s answering their phones…. ad nauseam.

My point was that D wanted to go eat with her boyfriend at 11:30 so we ALL had to go to lunch at 11:30 and since Baker B and I are sharing a car because the Civic has been in the shop for nearly a week getting things fixed that are yet MORE of the never-ending problems from having the engine replaced LAST SUMMER…. ummmm, sorry – back to the point – Baker B was still at lunch at 11:30 so I’m carless. And I am pretty certain there was something I really really really needed to do at lunch. Luckily I have no idea what it was, or I’d be even more irate. Also lucky the library is still open. I do wish it had occurred to me to bring my laptop so I could lounge upstairs in the overstuffed chairs instead of using one of the community computers. Oh, well.

I’m ready for a break. I better preface this next whine that I really do like D a lot. I am very fond of D!! D is one of the best co-workers you could have, and I’ll miss her a lot when she retires next summer. So when I say that D is kind of getting on my very last nerve this week, I think at this point anyone would be getting on my very last nerve. And D is kind of, ummmm, obsessive. D gets her mind on something and can’t get it off, and will go on and on and on and on about that something until I am seriously wanting to throw stacks of papers at her. D also has a pessimistic streak and assumes the worst of any situation. D also is quick to panic. And when D is upset/nervous/anxious/panicked, D will.Not.Stop.Talking.

Yesterday we really did have a Serious Incident. A Situation. We were going through the graduating seniors for the FOURTH time, and discovered that we had sent one a letter in October telling her she was all set to graduate as long as she passed her fall courses. Ooooops. She was actually short three hours. You have to have 122 hours to graduate, and as D informed us 12,378 times in the next five minutes, that is not negotiable. Nobody ever ever EVER graduates with less than 122 hours. I won’t go into the details because it will not make sense and I’m almost out of time already. Suffice to say that the shortage was due to her needing some courses for her minor and the Art department giving her credit for transfer work which had already been counted in her total hours. We all three missed that. She’d had a graduation audit last spring and that clearly said DO NOT DROP BELOW 122 HOURS so I really thought that was our loophole. So did L, our third coworker. The bad thing was that we sent her that "you’re okay!!" letter.

D did not think that would be a loophole. D thought we were all doomed. D said we’d done it now, we were hung, we’d screwed up BIG TIME, we were in SO MUCH TROUBLE. D said the student would sue the university. There’ll be a lawsuit, and we are DOOMED. D said that was IT, we were all pretty much fucked. Well, D didn’t say fucked because D doesn’t swear but that’s what she implied. We tried to find 3 more hours of transfer work we could count, but everything had been counted. We looked at this, we looked at that, D babbled on and on and said she was going to be sick. D seemed to think it entirely possible we’d all get fired.

And I’m thinking, WHAT???!!!???!!??

We sent the student a letter saying she’s okay. She’s actually NOT okay, but the not-okay part was really because of all that transfer work and subs that happened after the audit. It WAS bad that we sent her a letter saying she’s okay when she’s not, and that WAS our fault, but at the same time it IS the student’s responsibility to make sure they have done everything they need, and her audit, which she signed, said in no uncertain terms that she has to have 122 hours. So yeah, we screwed up but come ON. A lawsuit??? It would cost WAY more to sue the university than to just take one more three-hour class. I could see it being a huge horrible panic situation if our audit had been wrong, but it wasn’t.

Anyhow, I thought the extreme panic was WAY too much, but there was no reasoning with D. She also didn’t want to tell the ass’t dean because the ass’t dean DOES overreact to things herself. However, we finally let her know because D left a message on the student’s cell to call us, and of course it would end up being an ass’t dean issue.

Well, the ass’t dean didn’t think it was THAT big a deal either, and she pointed out a number of options the student has, including having the Tech department add three hours to the internship she’d done over the summer, if she’d worked enough hours at the internship to allow for that, and usually they do work more than they get credit for. Well, to make a long story a LITTLE shorter, the student called and is actually working at the same company she did the internship with, and they can use THAT to add three more hours to her internship. No more cost to her, and she can be backgraduated. She wasn’t even angry – she knew about all the subs and I think had suspected that might be a problem but thought the Art department knew what they were doing. Ha ha.

ANYHOW. This is how things have been going. And it IS way way way better than the College of Ed. I’m just tired and we’re all cranky and very very very ready for a break.

Oh, look, time to go back!!!

OOOOoooooOOOOO,  I do have GOOD news though – we got a new desktop for Baker B Monday (that’s a story in itself, the shipping of the computer from Dell, but no time for that now! Suffice to say I ordered it Friday and it arrived MONDAY after telling me it wouldn’t ship till the 20th) and…. we’re gettingDSL!!! ! (I can just HEAR the huge sighs of relief – no more complaining about dialup!!!) Our weird little phone company offers it, and we can get it for about $20 more than what we’re paying for dialup. I think Baker B actually went to get the modem today. We really didn’t have a lot of choice – we could get high speed through the cable company but that would mean getting rid of the dish and going back to cable and I really didn’t want to do that unless there was no other choice. DSL will be something like 50 times faster than dialup, and now we can use our wireless router with it. So I won’t be basically computerless over the break!!