Perspective, Academic Version

When I find myself getting annoyed and wanting to post something condescending like this:

Before sending email to the Director of Graduate studies about your difficulty finding a text on the reading list, because Flagship University’s copy is lost, try checking at the library of the university at which you are studying, which has that very text. Also, if I can find the answer to a question about a poem’s title on the first page of a Google search, so can you.

I try to remind myself that the administrative staff must surely often feel the same way about me and other faculty, when we fail to follow what must seem to them very clear instructions. For example, I was mortified when I got an email from Interlibrary Loan informing me that they would not be requesting that article for me, since it was available in OUR OWN LIBRARY. (They didn’t use all caps, but I’m sure they’d like to.)

Read Confessions of a Community College Dean or Geeky Mom for some critiques of faculty from an administrative and a staff perspective. I don’t always agree with them, especially Dean Dad, but I’ve learned a lot from reading their blogs (not just about what faculty can do wrong). They usually write about more general problems than the kind of specific examples I’m including here.

On the other hand, when I was filling out forms to add Zebediah to my health insurance coverage, the seemingly clear instructions

1. did not include instructions that applied to what I was trying to do with the multipurpose form (something like only having instructions on changing one’s name, not adding a dependent, though I don’t remember the details).

2. had incorrect instructions about where I should send the form (it said very clearly to send it away to a certain address, but in fact the Human Resources office collects it and checks it over first).

Bad Mother, Day Care Version

The woman who showed up fifteen minutes after Fancy Corporate Day Care closes? That was me.

Normally, it takes about 45 minutes to get from State U in Spring Town to the FCDC’s location (a few minutes farther than just getting home). Last week, it took me 45 minutes to get six miles, thanks to an accident on the freeway, so allowing a little more than an hour wasn’t good enough.

On the other hand, I’ve been here long enough that I know that there’s always a possibility of something like that happening: a truck full of pigs, or chocolate, or something less interesting crashes and closes down the interstate for a few hours, or a semi catches on fire and burns away the pavement, neccesitating a mid-day repaving operation, or like last week, a car accident shuts down two out of three northbound lanes (while the public radio announcer helpfully but incorrectly keeps telling me that there is an accident slowing things down on the southbound side).

Also, I only bothered giving them one bottle with 2 ounces of breastmilk, since he hasn’t been willing to drink more than a couple sips of it in the two months he has been attending day care a couple of days a week. That day, of course, he drank it all.

Following Directions

So I’ve been running for almost a month. I’ve settled into running Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Not exactly every other day, but it is a more sustainable schedule between my teaching schedule, Zebediah’s day care schedule, and so on.

DoctorMama says slow down, so I do. I wondered, though, if I were really running slower than I could walk, or if it just felt that way. A couple of days ago, when I got to the end of my 33-minute run (having increased the time by an approved 10%), I turned around and walked back the way I’d come. It took me 30 minutes to walk back over the route that had taken me 33 minutes to run.

I suppose sergeants don’t give gold stars, but surely I deserve one.

It’s a Good Thing He Likes Them

Zebediah Xerxes is not quite fourteen months old, and I just upgraded his LibraryThing account to a lifetime membership, because the arrival of a box of 64 books that my youngest cousin has outgrown put him over the 199-book limit.

One could point out that with two bookworms for parents, it is not surprising that he has so many books, but they are almost all gifts. In fact, I don’t think we have bought him any books yet. I’ve listed a three of the very few childhood books that I still have, and eventually I’ll add in my husband’s childhood tomes (they are currently shelved with his other books, so I haven’t put them into LibraryThing yet). The biggest culprits donors to Zebediah’s library are his grandparents (although not my English-professor father) and now the cousin.

He does love books, and these days he even spends a lot more time looking at them than he does chewing on them. We parents may have something to do with that.

And yes, I do have work to do. Why do you ask?