7:45am - Arrive at school. Need to make photocopies. Uggh!7:50am - Copier is out of staples. Nobody knows how to fix the problem. Guess I'll be stapling by hand.
7:52am - Uggh!!! The copier is making double copies of each page. Guess I'll be collating by hand too.
8:00am - What's this in my mailbox? Evaluation forms for my Pre-Hamsterfur class?!! I gave these out already! What? A note is attached: "These were left in your class. Please complete. They were due last week." But I specifically gave them to the students and had the volunteer take them to Administration. WHY WERE THEY NOT COMPLETED?!! I think I need to talk to the Dean.
8:02am - Arrive Dean's office.
Dean's Secretary - Hi EMH. Come in.
EMH - I need to talk to the Dean. Is he available?
Dean's Secretary - Yes. Just go on into his office.
Dean - Hi EMH! How are you?
EMH - It's Monday. Can't get any better...
<EMH shows blank stack of evals to Dean. Dean laughs it up and advises EMH to talk to his students and find out what happened. If they insist that they completed the evals, then just note that on the folder and turn in the blank evals. No biggee.>
8:10am - Dammit!!! Now I need correction tape. I'll need the Dean's Secretary for this one, since the correction tape is locked away in a cabinet, and she is the only one blessed with the keys.
Dean's Secretary - Hi again EMH...
<Up runs another faculty member.>
Other faculty member - Excuse me! I don't mean to be rude but this is important! I just came from the Hamster-fur lab. Someone left the gas on over the weekend. The whole lab is filled with gas! I opened the door and turned on the vent but...
Dean's Secretary - Okay. Let's call maintenance and have them assess the situation.
EMH to Dean - My 9:00am class is right next door to the lab. Should we evacuate?
Dean - Let's wait for what maintenance has to say.
<EMH returns to his lovely paper shuffling.>
8:45 - Oh my how time flies when you are not having fun! I wonder what the word is on the classroom.
Dean - We still haven't heard back from maintenance.
Dean's Secretary - I'll go ahead and move your room. You are in Room A so lets move you to Room B.
EMH - Um, excuse me! Room B is right next to Room A. Can we move to a place much further away? How about "that one classroom on the other side of campus that is never used"?
Dean's Secretary - Well it's not like the room is going to blow up...
<Walky talkie beeps. Maintenance is calling the Dean's office. Yes, we need to evacuate the building and we are very lucky that no-one caused anything to spark in there. EMH hears announcement and proceeds to go evacuate any students who may be in the room already. The secretary tells him no wait come back. Makes him wait an additional 2 minutes before finding the room number.>
EMH thinking - I can see that the lives of actual human beings is the last thing on their minds. Yet this school is so terrified of lawsuits.
8:50am - EMH arrives at classroom.
EMH - Everybody out! Room is being evacuated! Gas leak!\
<Students give deer in headlights look.>
EMH - I said let's go! Move it!
And it took about 30 minutes to see to everyone's safety. Typical Monday...
I had a situation similar to this once:
ReplyDeleteR/G: Hello Security, there's a broken window on the top floor of the Mongoose Management Center and pieces are falling into the courtyard
Security: Ok, thanks for letting us know. I'll leave a note for the guys when they get back from lunch.
R/G: Um.. did I mention the bit about the pieces of broken glass falling into the courtyard? Where the people are?
Security: Well what do you want us to do?
F/X: Bonk! sound of forehead hitting desk.
My high school had a fancy solar-powered science building, a product of the late '70s, that never generated much energy, but did do a very efficient job of shedding large sheets of ice, and sometimes broken solar-panel glass, on passers-by. There was, at least, an established protocol for predicting dangerous conditions and roping off the affected area (as there was for the area surrounding some of the most gothic -- and therefore ice-sheet-prone -- buildings on my grad-school campus). I suppose random breakage is less predictable, but you'd think that a general procedure for "look out below" conditions could be established and implemented as needed.
DeleteJeebus. Glad you're OK.
ReplyDeleteThough one wonders what they'd do if someone showed up waving a gun...or like at Pitt, with the bomb threats. "Go ahead to the class. We'll let you know if we find a bomb."
Am I terrible for thinking that the lack of staples would have been perceived as almost as big an emergency given our earlier discussion?
ReplyDeleteWhen I was living in grad school housing made up of "modular units" (i.e. trailers), we received a memo sometime in October alerting us that CO2 leaks had been found in some of the extremely antiquated heating units in our dwellings, and that, in order to avoid "adverse consequences" (i.e. possible death), all residents should cease using their heaters until further notice. The heaters were eventually replaced sometime in December, long about the time we were beginning to wonder how to avoid frozen pipes (and frozen everything else). As far as we could tell, discovery of the danger had been more or less accidental -- the result of a repair rather than any sort of inspection or awareness of the likely lifespan or inherent weaknesses of the design as it aged. If this had happened in the undergraduate dorms, there would, of course, have been riots and marches on the Ivy-clad historic administration building (by the parents if not the students). But grad students (and grad student brain cells) were apparently expendable (but not to the extent that they were willing to risk lawsuits based on possible future earnings -- paltry for humanists, of course, but there were a reasonable number of scientists living in the complex).
ReplyDeleteI'm still stuck on:
ReplyDeleteEMH - Everybody out! Room is being evacuated! Gas leak!\
EMH - I said let's go! Move it!
Are they so dumb that they've already programmed their minds for class-type words and they can't comprehend anything outside that narrow focus?
EMH, you're much more patient than I. My reaction to the stupid looks would've been, "LEAVE, OR DIE!"
No kidding. It's astonishing. I'd think "Gas leak! Everybody out!" would be a pretty energizing statement.
Delete