Please, Waste My Time.

Evidently, this is embedded somewhere in the new hire materials for the college. I say this because the last two days I've spent hours and hours in utterly useless meetings. Frankly, if there are more than two (possibly 3) people at a meeting, it becomes a pure waste of time. Nothing applies to everyone, so many people end up sitting around listening to brain cells die while they wait for a few nuggets of information that might be relevent to their needs and job description.

And very few people in academia seem to believe in a concept I call punctuality. The only things that will make me late are bad directions or intestinal aggravation. And I feel that the first is usually not my doing, and the second is really better dealt with before entering a poorly ventilated room of people.

The people in the department seem friendly and willing to help, even though no one can answer a question to save their lives. Now, given a month, or even a couple weeks to prepare for a class, I would be perfectly happy to peruse the fifteen books that other instructors have used for this class and choose the one that I think will work best for me. HOWEVER. Classes start in six days. SIX DAYS. Just hand me two books that worked really well and tell me to pick one. I cannot assess fifteen different books in the next two days. At least, I can't do it well. And I hate not doing things well.

Other than that... I still don't have a signed contract because they goofed and listed it as 8 credits instead of 9 and I refused to sign it and trust that they would fix it later. (Do I look so (stupid) trusting to you?) SO I still have no class rosters and no access to email or any of the other software I will need. Brilliant, really.

Did I mention that bit about SIX DAYS? Hmmm. So I did.

I also don't have an account on the master "z" drive, so I can't really save any of my work, since I don't have a permanent computer... nor do I travel with portable disk space. Oddly enough.

But I swear, I'm not as cranky as I sound. Promise.