feckityfeckityfeckityfeck

Boy, this day is being annoying. And has been from the minute I got up. Well, no, not from the minute I got up, not quite – I did my workout, and was glad I did, so that was good. I’ve only skipped one day this week. The Oz Festival is this weekend so I doubt I’ll manage it Saturday morning, but we’ll be hiking up a big mountain, so that’s okay. And Sunday Kim will be here (she’s going to Oz with us and spending the night Saturday, yay!) so I may not manage it then either. I could of course do it in the evening. 

So the workout was fine. WELL, I did get annoyed right before it, by stepping on the stupid scale and having it tell me I’d GAINED five pounds. Since SUNDAY. Ummmmm, hey, not possible! But still very maddening and mentally disruptive. And I don’t know what was up with that, unless my PJs weigh five pounds. I’m SURE that’s the answer. But I am kind of peeved at not having lost any noticeable weight, despite three weeks of doing this workout. And it’s not a matter of having suddenly gained all this muscle, either, since my clothes are not looser. I may of course be eating more than I think, since I have not been really focusing on that. Anyhow, whatEVER, I think I’ll stay away from the damned scale for awhile. I FEEL better, and that’s the IMPORTANT thing. I have more ENERGY, thanks very much. I’ve been walking in the afternoons too, so I’m getting lots of exercise, and if the damned scale doesn’t want to reflect that, FINE. I’ll not get on it again. Feckity feckity feck.

SO I am annoyed right off the bat, but I zip through the workout, even advancing a bit in some things I have not been able to do till now, yay! And I am running right on time and things are FINE… and then I get dressed and find I hate the outfit I decided last night I’d wear. Black pants, teal sweater – the black pants are too big, the teal sweater is too clingy. But I have other black pants! I have two other pairs. Both of which are far too tight. I jerk the too-big ones back on (no congratulations in order – they have never NOT been on the large side) and try another sweater that I like. It’s too short for the too-big pants; everyone is going to be seeing my not-shrinking midsection whenever I raise my arms. FINE. I try on three other pairs of pants, thinking surely to GOD SOMETHING is going to fit because I’ve been WORKING OUT, for fuck sake!!!! Well, I could get them ON but they were all way way way too tight for office wear. And I’d have just worn dark jeans but I had a meeting today so wanted to look a little less hobo-ish than usual. Finally resort to some kind of weird big-leg brown pants and a weirder crinkly-material shirt with seams that hit in odd places and a yet-weirder-still sparkly sequin very thin sweater thing I got at Banana Republic but hardly ever wear because I’m generally not a sparkly sequiny dresser. It was CHEAP. Oh, and my weird shirt is VERY low-cut, something I’m not all that comfortable with, so I keep having to make sure it’s not sliding down even lower. 

Yeah, that will be a big hit at the meeting. "Hi! Good to see you again! I don’t think you’ve met my lovely blue brassiere!" 

AAGGHH. So by then of course I am no longer on time, but am running seriously late and when I manage to get mascara pretty much all over my entire face, I am ready to just forget it and call in…. annoyed. Sorry, too peeved to come to work this morning!   

And of course we are having all sorts of Issues at work, mostly having to do with a student who should have graduated in summer of 2008. But her degree is not showing up on her transcripts! Odder yet, it was not the student that contacted me about this. I don’t think the student has realized it, and she is, I assume, now working in the very professional field that this degree would hopefully lead to a job in. No, it was someone in the department who contacted me. Even more confusingly, this major is no longer one of ours. It’s part of the college that split off from our college a couple of years ago. So we don’t even have those files any more. (I am being intentionally vague about all this, since I do not have many nice things to say about that department, and I don’t want to get fired for writing libelous stuff on my blog. In the highly unlikely event that anyone who might know what I’m talking about and would be offended actually READS my blog). 

So right before I really need to leave for my meeting, I’m running all over the building trying to find this person’s file so I can see why exactly she didn’t graduate. We’ve moved twice since the summer of 2008; the new college where her file should have been sent has moved once, and the department her major is in has moved about eleventy million times. Oddly enough, we are now all three in the same building. Which was handy this morning, since for some reason our phones just completely quit working. Anyhow, I was dashing madly about from the first floor to the third floor and back trying to figure this out. I have to say that of all the departments we lost in the New College Creation, this was the one I was SO SO SO happy to see go. It was a new program when I started this job, and it was A MESS. There was tons of misinformation flying around, nobody knew what the hell they were doing, and it was just awful. We never had a clear picture of who was in the program since we often never got copies of their files. So it was no surprise that we couldn’t find this one, although in digging around I DID find an email that I’d sent a coordinator that same summer — she’d sent me a list of their students who were graduating in August and I’d emailed her back listing deficiencies we’d found for most of them. And by the student now in question’s name I’d said we never got a graduation application for her. So THAT is why she never graduated. She never applied, we never cleared her.  

I think what amazed me the most (I’m not sure WHY I was amazed, except I guess I’d assumed everyone by now SURELY knows what they’re doing in that department) is that they still don’t seem to have a clue. The woman who came asking me about this student said, "But she graduated! She went through the ceremony, and she walked across the stage! And she’s in the graduation program!" That last actually did baffle me for about ten seconds — your name doesn’t get printed in the program unless you’ve applied to graduate– but as for walking across the stage, I could go walk across the stage. People are always walking across the stage without graduating, since August graduates don’t have a ceremony and get to walk with the May students. That means exactly nothing, and how these coordinators STILL don’t know that is beyond me. Oh, and the program was THEIR program. Their program from their own private ceremony for their students, which also has nothing to do with them being awarded a degree by the university. AAAGGHHH!! 

And the coordinator I was talking to kept saying, "Oh, well we can just graduate her now! We can just confer her degree!"

And I kept saying "……. ummmm…… well actually NO, she has to be backgraduated through New College so they have to approve it,"…. while thinking but not saying… "and given the mess all your other studentswere in when we had to clear them, I’m SURE she’s missing about a gazillion things to graduate!!!" 

And she kept saying, "oh, no, no, we can just graduate her, we don’t have to go through New College!" 

Which makes me think she does not have even the vaguest clue about how students graduate. And she has been doing this job for YEARS. 

ANYHOW, I had no intention of ranting on so long about that. New College Director and I ended up agreeing that I would check Mystery Student out and our college will backgraduate her if (by some miracle) she’s okay, since New College didn’t actually exist yet in summer of 2008 so that could be an issue down the road. Now the Annoying Department is supposed to send me a copy of her file, but since none of them has replied to that yet, I’m not holding my breath. I was SO hoping I’d get out of doing anything else with this and it would be in New College’s hands now, but oh well.  I have no idea how this student could have not realized in the past three years that she never got her degree, especially if she is working. The whole thing is just (typically) bizarre, and now I have got to get off the computer. Stay tuned for the next installment of Bizarro World!