Today is a day to reflect before toddling off to work my five hour evening shift at the career college. The sun is shining yet again, although it's cooler today, and breezy. Leaves levitate in swirls and eddies. Maple seed helicopters whirl earthward, glowing in the sun, to lie scattered all over the ground. I'll see little maple tree sprouts in odd nooks and crannies next spring. If I had time I would head up for a trot in the park. We are having an amazing stretch of dry weather. In fact, we've had only a quarter inch of rain in the past three months, which apparently is a record since data has been kept at the Portland Airport. It's not summer anymore, for sure. It's now uber-summer, the strange season we sometimes get in early October. Days are warm, nights are frosty. The grass is brown, the ground is rock-hard. My black car is coated with a fine veneer of dust. The air is dry as a bone, a bane to firefighters struggling to contain wildfires raging in Washington and eastern Oregon. So far no one is using the d-word: drought.
To complement the new season, we have a new term at the career college. It's been a busy couple weeks, trying to end a term and prepare for a new one. New term, new schedule, new faces, new rooms... and same old problems. The parking lot is emptier than it should be, for both morning and evening classes. (Come on all you new marketing and admissions people, we are counting on you to save us!) Management is demonstrating its usual disregard for employee morale and empowerment. The tech department, intent on launching the latest gadgetry, is ignoring feedback from both faculty and students. I haven't seen the college president in weeks: he usually makes himself scarce around term ends and beginnings, as if he fears one of us might accost him for some help.
The latest debacle to rave about is the bungled implementation of Microsoft Outlook.Live. Outlook.Live, for some unknown reason, is now management's communication tool of choice. (Oh, could it be because it is .... free?) Faculty and students are required to sign-up and sign-in daily to check for messages—from whom we are not sure. The word “bullshit” has been bandied about by numerous frustrated parties, as log on IDs and passwords fail to work, and when they finally do, and we are finally granted access to the miracle known as Outlook.Live, there's nothing there to reward our suffering. No important messages from management, anyway, except to tell us to force students to sign up. It's a classic management blunder. If I were to write a book on customer service quality, this would have to be in it, as an example of what not to do.
Hey, I almost forgot, if anyone is reading this and keeping up on my endless dissertation saga: Good news, my chairperson reported via email that she sent my concept paper to the committee (whoever they are). I don't think that means she has approved the paper, I think she is just tired of reading it and would like to... share the love, as it were. I hope this is good news, but I'm afraid to get my hopes up. She said she is trying to streamline the process for me, which I appreciate.
