Dean Suzy's Day

Here we are, folks, another installment of Dean Suzy's Day, written to make you happy you don't have to deal with this stuff as well!

• The early morning oral exam was interrupted by the crew wanting to finally install the data projector that was ordered 6 months ago. My secretary is off sick, so when they called to say they'd be coming by no one answered, so they just came anyway. Oh, and after I threw them out, they sent a nasty email in the afternoon announcing that they will be charging me 2 work hours for this.
• We've just moved two departments, and they are back on telephone service and internet. One silverback used his CCing-talents to widely complain that the snail mail wasn't being sorted properly and all of it was in a box in the hallway. Upon investigation it turned out to be a box of advertising, and he just didn't have a key to the real mail room. He included a student in his rant email who had just handed in his thesis 2 days ago. The student called in panic that we have surely lost his thesis if it was just in a box on the hallway. I suggested he calm down, take a sedative if necessary, and let us sort it out.
• A student sent an email at 9:13 am, another one at 11:12 am and a third one at 1:42 pm to ask if this was the correct email because he had handed in his work due yesterday at midnight and I hadn't graded it yet.
• We have a number of search committees running, and applicant flakes who didn't read far enough down on the ad to see that we want their materials in writing on paper sent me emails with 10 attachments clocking in at about 5 MB each and effectively killing my mailbox.
• The IT department declares it is not responsible for all the printers and all the copiers being offline and the old copy cards being unusable. There was an error in the new copy cards and this is the fault of the copier company and not their responsibility, although they took out all the old copiers. I have a printer/copier I operate illegally, i.e. outside of the reach of the IT department. It works. I have a long line of people needing to use it. Die, IT department, die! I called the IT boss to complain, but he's at a conference. I guess they go to conferences to trade stories on how to make our lives miserable.
• I went for lunch today and sat down with one department head. As we were talking, a second department head came and sat down on my other side and started asking me a pressing question while I was in the middle of a sentence to the first DH. Two tables down a third department head saw me and rushed over, asking *his* Important Question as he approached. My multi-processing unit overloaded and I appear to have growled. They ran for cover.
  
• DH 3 caught me on the trip back from lunch to rant about how useless the administration is and no one listens to him and he needs all this stuff right now and he's going to go pout in a corner and make everyone in his department pout with him if I don't give him what he wants. Need I note that what he wants is not in my power to give? As my sainted aunt used to say: Let's have a pity party, one, two, three, ohhhhhhhh.
  
• I tried to explain to a search committee chair why I would not be hiring the one candidate they want me to hire. The candidate submitted two letters of reference from two different people in two different cities that were identical. This does not make me happy. That's all I need, a plagiarizing proffie.
• And on the bright side, we had open house in the afternoon, and a Dad came up to me to ask if I was that woman he had seen on TV recently. Yes, I was, oh my, someone saw it and remembered! Seems to have been good advertising. Now send us your money child in the fall!