I actually spent about 20 minutes on the online form, noting that my teaching load has gotten heavier but that there are still only 24 hours to a day and that apart from the real research done in our department, pretty much the rest of the school sucks.
I ranted a bit on "what can we do better" box, noting that the AdminFlakes could perhaps change their attitude and see themselves as helping us to do our job, not us filling out their damn forms.
I pressed the send button, and waited. And waited. And then my browser responded that the server was timing out. I tried it a few times, then gave up and tried to send it the next day. No luck.
All that good, anonymous(*) bitching for naught. I sometimes think they hire incompetent flakes on purpose.
{* not really, they assigned up login numbers}
I bet if you resubmit with happy shiny comments, it will work fine.
ReplyDeleteNot because they made it that way. Just because the universe is seemingly belligerent.
Of course they hire incompetent flakes on purpose. It's well known that people tend to hire people like themselves.
ReplyDelete"noting that the AdminFlakes could perhaps change their attitude and see themselves as helping us to do our job, not us filling out their damn forms."
ReplyDeleteAlas, they do think that having us fill out their forms is somehow helping us do our jobs...
Yeah, we get those "workplace satisfaction surveys" in the email too. Some Consultant of Trivialities is probably making big bucks from this, corruption-like. I think I filled out the first one, a couple of years back; it took too long. So now I just ignore them completely, with a smile on my face; I especially enjoy getting repeated "reminders" smacking of desperation. I think my colleagues understand that an ultra-low response rate expresses our repudiation of the Provost and the Chancellor more loudly than anything we might say on the form. And while I'm at it, I decline to do evaluations of the dean and dept head as well. Pointless waste of time in a rubber-stamping, old-boy environment, all of it.
ReplyDeleteIf they're anything like the adminicritters here at Community College of the State of Denial, they're soliciting input, no matter how good or bad, so that when they make changes that no one other than administration wants, they can say that they consulted faculty when the change is presented to the Board of Trustees/Regents/Whatever-They're-Called-At-Your-Institution.
ReplyDeleteSome guy from a "Quality Mangement Department" I never knew we had answered my complaint email this morning with a long apology. Noooo, there had been no problems with the server that *they* could see. I should have been pressing the "intermediate save" button on every one of the 15 pages and then re-entering my "password". Luckily, using the back button of my browser, the rest was still there. I decided to de-anonymize myself (all I had to do was check my years in service, my school, and my gender) and stand by my comments. And imagine that, I could store it, no problems!
ReplyDeleteThey probably restarted the server, not realizing that it had died.
@Pat, I didn't think of that, but you are surely right on that. Drat.
I've been burned so many times filling in web forms that anything longer than a sentence or two gets written in a text editor and saved to disk.
ReplyDeleteI also suspect that Pat is right. As I said about a similar thing the other day, the point of the exercise is to appear to be doing something, not to actually do anything.
But I fill out their consarned surveys anyway, about 66% of the time. And I say what I want, because tenure, fuck yeah! I'm just naive enough to believe it might make a difference some time, and cynical enough to insert something that will let me know if they're really keeping it anonymous.
The survey, I suspect, is the modern incarnation of the "suggestion box" (complete with suspected direct connection to the round file).
ReplyDelete