really really really bad ideas!

You know what’s way up there high at the top of the Really Really Really Bad Ideas list? Having someone send out, oh, 300 emails, and having them guess at what each address is! Because when you guess at what the address is instead of making certain of what the address is, you know what happens? Yes! Approximately 280 emails bounce right back!!!!!

Bet you can guess what I was doing all day long today.

Yep, pretty much all of those emails from yesterday bounced right back. And it wasn’t for the reasons I expected – well, that may be why they will come bouncing back again tomorrow, the names are probably all misspelled, but the big reason they all came bouncing back last night like great big tires that have gotten loose on the highway and are heading right for us, is that …. get this… all the schools do NOT have consistent email addresses. SO when the Ass’t Dean said that we could just type them all in that same format, where if John Doe worked in, say, Watauga County his email would be jdoe@watauga.k12.nc.us, and if he worked in Avery County it would be jdoe@avery.k12.nc.us – – SHE WAS WRONG!!! If John Doe works in Watauga, it’s johndoe@watauga.k12.nc.us! If he works in Avery it’s doej@avery.k12.nc.us! If he works in Buncombe it’s something really bizarre like jdoe@bcsemail.org!!!! Some of them are john_doe. Some of them are johndoe. Some of them are doej, some are jdoe. Some of the counties used that k12.nc.us thing, some didn’t. Some are .us, some are .org, some are .net. They are SO not consistent!!

So. All day long, I went through the list of bounced emails and tried to figure out a)was the name spelled right, b)was the address spelled right, c)were there typos in either one, d)which county was it going to and how exactly DID they do their emails and is that how WE did it? Most of the time, no it wasn’t. Oh, and e) was it really the teacher’s name and not the student’s name, since there were a gazillion wrong ones from the people who didn’t know what they were doing yesterday that got left in there somehow.

All. Day. Long.

The first thing I saw when I came in was a stack of emails and notes in my chair from the Ass’t Dean, including one from the Dean saying that all the emails had bounced back and for ME to “gather the forces” and work on getting them fixed first thing. Who exactly ARE the forces?? Why, ME, of course. I’m sure he meant for me to put the grad students on it, but honestly, it was a one-person job. First of all I couldn’t figure out HOW exactly to break this up into parts so they could help me. I am a very bad delegator, it’s true, but I just couldn’t see how I could do that without risking that it would get screwed up even further. Second, we didn’t HAVE any students till the afternoon. Third, this whole fiasco has proven my great Theory of the Workplace to be true:

“If you want something to NOT be totally and completely screwed up beyond belief, you’d better just go on and do it your own damn self.”

This is exactly why I despise group work. I HATE teams. Because when you have a team, you have a bunch of people who have no clue and everything gets hopelessly screwed up and you end up with a fiasco that one person has to spend a week fixing. Of course, this would have been a fiasco anyhow since despite being under the impression that I was the only one who DID know what I was doing on Friday and who did it right, I did it wrong too since the emails are NOT consistent. But at least it would have just been that and not student names instead of teacher names on a whole bunch of them.

Well, I worked all day on it and I stayed till seven, and I got all the emails corrected that it was possible to correct. All the ones that weren’t, say, to people in counties where we didn’t even HAVE student teachers, like several inexplicably were. I still have to go back and compare this list with the list of student teachers and see who the hell got left out, since we appear to be about thirty teachers short, but I think that is something I actually can give to my student to do.

Meanwhile, the piles of things on my desk that have needed to be done RIGHT THIS MINUTE since, oh, last Thursday are overflowing into the floor. I haven’t gone through my mail, I’ve ignored all my emails. Because this all started last Thursday, and this email had to go out LAST THURSDAY and do you know what should have been done last Thursday?? Yes, we should have emailed each student teacher supervisor to send me a list of the emails for all their cooperating teachers. A nice, CORRECT list of the emails that they used themselves all semester. But, no, we couldn’t do that because this email had to go out IMMEDIATELY and it COULDN’T WAIT for the supervisors to just send me everyone’s address. As they would have had plenty of time to do, had we asked them LAST THURSDAY. Now here it is going to be Tuesday before it goes out. I did email the computer guy at about three today to tell him I had a bunch he could send, and he never emailed me back, so it will be tomorrow before anything goes out again. To just come bouncing right back because the names are misspelled.

Basically, I work for lunatics.

The one bright spot – which has nothing to do with my job – is that we got approved for a line of credit through our bank. It’s really a home equity loan which they call a “line of credit” so it won’t sound like something you could lose your house over, which it is – but we’re going to use to pay off our ghastly credit card bills, since this will have lower interest and is also tax deductible. The really funny thing is that the woman from the bank told me that my credit rating is just outstanding. I believe she said it’s a 7.6. I have no clue what that means, but she told me that generally she only sees doctors and lawyers with credit ratings that high. Which I found quite ironic, since I’m in debt up to my ears. But I’m the perfect credit card customer – I have lots of debt and I make payments on time and generally pay more than the minimum, but not a LOT more, so I never get out of debt, but I always stay afloat and have no trouble making payments. But it gave me a very good rate on this loan. And maybe we can get out of debt eventually now.

Good god, it’s past midnight. I have got to go to BED.