Windmills?

Another installment in the crazy series called Dean Suzy's Day.

• A spider crawled out of my cereal in the morning as I was poring on milk. The day sort of went downhill after that.
• I received a letter from one of those college ranking things dated Nov. 28, 2011 giving me the results of their recent ranking. I think I'm in a time warp. The cover letter says they are giving me the data early before they put out their press release. I read it last Monday in the paper - I just love mornings where I read important things like this that have to do with me and I don't know what's happening. Anyway, one of the students in the almost-all-male Basketweaving Technology Program wrote in that they need more male teachers. I suppose this is an objection to the woman we hired last year.
• A scholarship organization would love to give my most deserving students a scholarship if I just send them a list of their names, addresses, birth dates, and social security numbers. Yeah.
• The Vice President for Procrastination and Paper Production called. He wants to have a bright shiny new program for Buzzword Studies. He thinks it would be a great fit and wants my Department of Organ Grinders to set up the program jointly with some Chemists or Biologists or whatever in another faculty. And we can pre-finance it because we already have most of the courses needed on offer. I tried to explain that our Organ Grinding Technology labs are booked solid. He suggested that we just schedule the classes on weekends or evenings then and have the proffies teach overtime. I told him to get lost.
• We have a new inner-campus mail carrier. Whoever put out the spec forgot that we were moving a group of departments to new location C. They only deliver mail from and to A and B. Our large collection of mail for C was just left piled up. We dug out the urgent stuff and had someone walk that over to the building.
• The administration rented some more office space in nearby building D and moved an entire research group of people belonging to my faculty into the building. I heard about the move over lunch in the afternoon from the proffie in charge of the research group. The only official notice I got was that they bitched at us for not getting them their mail, either.
• I taught a Master's class and had an enjoyable time. The most fun was the look on Lazy Larry's face when he realized that today was the deadline for choosing a topic for the graded presentation and everyone else already submitted their requests. The only two topics left deal with math. And the drop date has already passed.
• I finished off two glowing recommendations for tenure packets (I really want to keep these two!) and then checked my email. There was a letter from the Vice President of Research kindly informing me that one of my proffies has just won financing for his windmill research (I am not making this up) and I need to provide research space. WTF?!? I don't have room for windmills!! A phone call to the secretary cleared it up. A copy and paste error. The previous letter to a fellow dean told him to cough up space for windmill research. She just replaced the name with the name of my proffie and then forgot to change it to his research topic. He just needs a desk, a chair, a telephone, and a computer with an Internet connection.

I'll have a gin and tonic. Hold the tonic.

Dean Suzy