Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Oh, Lordy...

Dear Dean Lordy,

You are the reason everyone hates it here and you will be the reason this ship sinks.  I know you get off on whipping adjuncts against the post for every piddle little piece of crap over the top anal superfluous bookkeeping task they botch, so it probably pleases you that you have created so many of this asinine and pointless tasks that no one could possibly succeed.

It should interest you to know, however, that in the spring, none of the adjuncts with any experience have put your campus on their preference list.  None.  Good luck running a college with 70% of your "faculty" being a bunch of first year grad students from the large local and woefully underfunded public system.  If you thought it was bad with us actually teaching, but failing to submit the same essential information in the fourth stupid format you requested, wait until you have instructors accidentally making bombs in the lab.

Love,
     WotC

PS fuck yourself

18 comments:

  1. Any way you could keep us posted on this, Wombat? It sounds like a semester-long feast of schadenfreude.

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    1. I second the motion. I love followups to epic admin asshattery.

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    2. Yes, and the followups help us distinguish it from run-of-the-mill admin asshattery.

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  2. With email it is so easy to blast a request to tens or hundreds of highly skilled professionals, the compliance of said request amounting to busy work, and the requestor paying no heed to the requestees' already full plates onto which even more shit has been heaped.

    I think I mentioned here how I spoke up on behalf of my colleagues against subdeans and adminiflakes dunning us with all their redundant forms. Sometimes we make baby steps forward.

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  3. I like the "letters never sent" motif. Carly Simon recorded an album by that name. I think we could continue to use it here to similar good effect, albeit with a different intent.

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    1. There were a number of these in a series for a while...and for once I did a non-blurry graphic. It was not always thus.

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    2. I loved Carly Simon as a teen. If you collected all her album covers you got to see her without any clothes on. (When you're 14 that's a big deal!)

      I still like her music.

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    3. I bought her albums because I liked her music, too. I did not know that about all the covers--did you have to arrange them a certain way? I would be lying if I said her charms manifest on the covers I did own had escaped my notice.

      It was a wonderful time in music when the tide had shifted to where "mainstream" acts both composed and performed their own songs, and in many cases produced them as well. This contrasts to the earlier model of a producer bringing in The Wrecking Crew to back a "band" who sang what other people had written. OK, some of the latter turned out to be quite good. But I generally found that the song's originator could reach somewhere deeper in my brain and heart.

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  4. Please, please tell me there's some way to make this guy responsible for the mess he's created. I'm guessing that will be somewhere between very difficult and impossible, but I really wish there were a way (local investigative journalist who's really reliable about confidentiality? anonymous (but more specific that this one) web site? Anonymous snail mail to the president, governing board, and/or legislators? A private word with faculty at the place supplying the grad students, to let them know about the problem? They, actually, might have as much leverage as anyone, which probably isn't much.)

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  5. Follow-up letter: "I apologize, I don't have anything against the horse you rode in on."

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  6. Basically, I made a mistake and he wants me to sign to acknowledge a letter that asserts I "ignored" policy. I'll sign something that says "I'm a fucking moron who fucking fucked something the fuck up" if he wants, but Hell will freeze over before I acknowledge a bullshit accusation of willful disobedience. It's not the original mistake I'm even upset about. It's a fair enough criticism. But he can stomp and puff until he blows his own balls off if he thinks I'll let him categorize it as something worse than an honest mistake.

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    1. I'm not sure whether it would make things better or worse, but if faced with a demand that I sign/acknowledge a document regarding my employment (other than a standard contract), I'd get assertive (or dithery, whichever seemed more likely to work) and say that I'd have to run it by my attorney (even if my attorney was my cat), or union rep (if same is available). It is, after all, a logical consequence of huffing and puffing and throwing one's bureaucratic weight around that people get nervous about one's demands. Then again, (perceived) foot-dragging might not go over well, so a simple, "I'm very sorry, again, for my mistake, but I do want to emphasize that it was not deliberate" is probably sufficient.

      P.S. I wonder whether some people are, in fact, responding to his unreasonable demands by ignoring them? It's been known to happen, especially in situations where the power balance is badly out of whack, and there are little or no working official avenues for recourse.

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    2. he can stomp and puff until he blows his own balls off

      Let us pause to savor this imagery.

      I like the idea of running this "confession" past a professional advisor. One can't be sure how these documents might be used against one in future situations, and admitting to something one didn't do could have... repercussions.

      Do you have access to an ombudsman?

      Hypothetically, if someone wanted me to sign a document admitting to something I didn't do, and then got huffy if I refused to sign without counsel, I would reply "I am sure that if signing is the right thing for me to do, other parties will have no problem seeing that. What, specifically, are you afraid of happening if I show this to someone else"?

      Easy for me to say.

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  7. Dear Wombat,

    I think I have failed to say often enough in the past how much I love you and how dearly I treasure every one of your posts.

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  8. Thanks for the support, as usual, CMers, you help save my sanity.

    Chair called me to her office and quietly rolled her eyes at it and told me I'm right and to ignore it and Lordy would move on. And that's what's happening. I love Chair, and it's a good thing, because I took a year+ "off" to work in private industry (which actually sucked more than you can imagine), so my seniority is kind of low. I'll probably be here again - but at least Chair and I see eye-to-eye.

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