Follow your own title’s advice: Come to a place of someone who has them (since “everybody” does), see the bedbugs, then lie down and take a nap. Once you wake back up, you’ll be one of the cool kids.
How about (loudly, but in a very concerned tone), “Do you need yours back? Oh, you shouldn’t have given more than you can afford! I’ll get it back to you right away.”
I think if my boss is going to snoop through my personal things, that he should put them back the way he found them.
Fuck you, administration, for scheduling a “mandatory” faculty meeting on Friday morning that consisted of nothing but filling us in on the progress of the construction and technology updating effort on campus, and then had us break up into small groups to discuss, YET AGAIN, the lameass Bain book.
Point the first - I, and many of my colleagues, don’t come to campus on Fridays. The reasons are not that we are lazy, spoiled, good-for-nothing layabouts eating bonbons on our balconies and therefore must be punished by nonsensical busy work. The reasons are that by Friday, many of us have been on campus for far longer than our contract hours, not to mention all of the grading and other work we do at HOME, and on Fridays, I work from HOME to be able to finally, maybe, catch up with grading and updating without having to be bothered by people wandering into my office to which I cannot close the damn door because of the stupid campus culture of a-constantly-open door policy. You forced us to be on campus on the ONE day that many of us have uninterrupted time to do the things that require focused concentration, to give us information that doesn’t matter to us and that you could have sent us in an email.
Point the second - fucking ENOUGH with the Bain book. We had him come to speak at the yearly circle-jerk and “let’s clap for ourselves” get-together the week before classes started, we had discussion sessions and small groups with him and without him that same week, we have a book-study group and a learning community dedicated to discussing the book, and we have ongoing forced discussions about the book in every faculty meeting throughout the semester. For you to waste our time with completely unproductive “small group activities” led by the fucking DEANS, most of whom AREN’T FROM FACULTY AND HAVE NEVER TAUGHT IN A CLASSROOM BEFORE IN THEIR FUCKING LIVES, is a signal of how you truly feel about what we do. Fuck you all.
And fuck you, Accounting and Student Affairs, for imposing new restrictions on reimbursements that state that if I want to bring in a guest speaker for my classes, a guest speaker who is donating his or her time, and buy him or her a $25 gift card to Starbucks as a thanks, that I have to get that person to fill out a W-9? Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you and your penny-pinching obstructionist bullshit. I’ll just make ALL my mother-fucking classes high cost, requiring extra course fees from my students, and use those fees for reimbursement, and you and your cock-sucking assholish ways can take long goat-felching walk off a short fucking pier.
:eek: :eek: :eek:
Speaking of people you work with, I’m starting to strongly suspect the women I work with of throwing me off my cycle now that I’m not on the rigid artificial schedule of the Pill. I keep getting my period sooner than expected, and frankly, I’d like my half a week back, please. If I’m getting them more often, than I’m getting more of them than a woman with a 28-day cycle (right? or am I just gonna hit menopause sooner?) and if that’s true then I feel a little ripped off.
Perhaps it’s just karmic payback for college, when I moved in with one of my close friends into the tight shared space of a dorm room, and promptly threw her completely off-cycle. I was Pilled at the time, so my cycle wasn’t gonna change - something had to give - and to be honest, it secretly made me feel all “Rawr! I am the superior warrior woman! My hormones and pheromones trump your puny chemicals!”
(Hm. I should give her a call and say “hi.” Although, “I was thinking of you!” might be going too far, given the context. “Well, I was talking with a bunch of strangers about periods, and your name came up.”)
I can’t believe how many college and university administrative types think that this sort of corporate feelgood sessions are a good idea. One of the (very few) advantages of being adjunct faculty is that i can blow shit like this off with no consequences.
What’s the Bain book, by the way?
What The Best College Teachers Do. It’s six fucking years old, and yea, I’ve read it. It’s got some interesting points, some bullshit ones, and some “what the fuck ever” ones, and my administration this year (aided by our spineless jellyfish brown-nosing suck-up of a faculty senate president) has fallen in cultish love with this thing. It is everywhere, including today.
And it’s midterm time, we’ve got shit to do like grading and consoling sobbing students and planning the rest of the semester and ordering books for next semester and lesson prepping and writing shit. Leave us the FUCK ALONE, kthxbai.
I think many such books have a similar mix of useful, useless, and completely obvious information.
I haven’t read that one, but i’ve read a couple of books about college teaching. One problem is that, despite their claims to universality, the fact is that books like this often ignore the fact that the college teaching and learning experience can differ markedly, depending on the type of institution.
While i’m sure there are some basic pedagogical strategies that are universally applicable, the fact is that teaching strategy has to reflect the audience. I adopt quite a different approach to teaching my classes in the Cal State system than i did at Johns Hopkins or at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Many of my Cal State students just can’t cope with the same level of intellectual rigor as students at those expensive private colleges, because they just haven’t had the preparation.
Also, in many cases they’re first-gen college students, and seem to have rather different expectations of the whole experience. They are often nervous about expressing an opinion, and also are reticent about asking for help.
Actually, one of the most helpful books i’ve read in my effort to deal with these sorts of issues is The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another. The author focuses mainly on community colleges, but i found that many of her main points are relevant to a second-tier university system like Cal State too, because many of these students actually come to us from community colleges or are first-generation college students.
Dear Other Shoe,
I love you, New Husband, but for the love of all that’s holy, silence your friggin’ phone if you’re going to take a nap, so I don’t have to feel bad that I woke you up.
It’s your day off; you’re allowed to take a nap. Hell, take two - you work hard. But silence the damn thing so if I call to ask you about something minor that can totally wait, I don’t have to listen to your groggy “No, no, it’s okay, I wasn’t yawn asleep.” I feel bad! I woke you up!
I’ll check that one out, but you can bet your ass I’m not mentioning it to anyone, because I am fucking SICK of this concentration on “let’s break up into small groups and discuss for the 80th time this semester the same goddamn book we’ve been talking about for ten weeks.”
It really isn’t so much the content of the book. It’s okay, relatively harmless as these things go (although his proposals of not using the word “requirements” in the syllabus or accepting all late work at any time for any reason are complete fucking nonsense). It’s the slavish devotion to constantly reanalyzing and reiterating the content over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again that is starting to drive me bugfuck.
And I’m still not over the “let’s schedule a fascinating discussing of the college’s construction schedule” on a Friday. Wankers.
I fucking hate teaching the Fed.
I fucking hate the students’ misguided legalistic explanations of why the Fed is illegal and unconstitutional.
I fucking hate when they complain that the Fed is privately owned and then look at me smugly as if that settles the issue.
Mainly, I fucking hate having 750 b-school freshmen and knowing that the only time half of them are going to talk to me is to ask me if I’ve read End the Fed.
I expect that shit from the morons I see on most of the financial forums - people who read Von Mises and think that is the answer to everything. But presumably to get into bus. school, they’ve had to take one or 2 economics courses. So what’s the deal. Are they putting diplomas in Cap’n Crunch now or is basket weaving now a legit undergrad major?
They’re actually undergrads in the business school - prospective accounting or marketing majors and the like. Apparently our business school requires the students to take a bunch of social science courses like Intro to Micro, Intro to Macro, and Psych 101. But please, don’t let that distract you from the beauty of a kid fresh out of high school haughtily asking if YOU’VE done any research on this.
I blame the parents. Instead of reading something like Business Week or watching Bloomberg (the only financial news worth watching in my humble opinion) they think that they can believe all the crap they read from the so-called ez-spurts on the intertubes. It’s like a contagious disease that gets passed on to their children.
This has been brewing for a long time, and last night was ENOUGH!! Why is it every time I get a sandwich or burger or sub, my slice of tomato is always *always *the core? Bad enough that the tomato is often orange and flavorless, but does it have to include a hard yellow center every single time? I swear, I can go out with a group of people, we can all order sandwiches with tomato, and only I get the stinking core slice!
I am not amused. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Along the same lines, why is there NEVER an already ‘started’ onion in the fridge when I go to cook? Hmm? I peel onions, slice off what I need, put the rest into a glass jar for the next time I want a bit of onion… But the next time I want to put a slice of onion on a sandwich, is it there? NO. :mad:
And let’s not even start in on the empty roll of tp.
It’s a conspiracy, I tell you.
And why do I always get my meal last in a restaurant? I’m the slowest eater in the world - you’d think the law of averages would have me getting it first once in a while, but nooooo - I’m always last, and I’m always eating alone with a cleared table and people looking like they’re waiting for me to be done.
My dumbshit Director: “You take the same calls as everyone else”
My last four Supervisors: How do YOU always get these calls?
(Although to be fair, one of them later said “Chimera, you’re the only one who cares” - and he didn’t mean that in a positive way about me. He was inferring that it was a bad thing that I spent the effort to catch fraud and correct major errors by other people - he thinks I’m “high maintenance” as an employee. Good thing he’s not my supervisor anymore.)
My quality coach upon reviewing several months of my calls: You’re right. You don’t take the same calls as everyone else.
Temporary Quality coach while listening to my calls today: What queue are YOU in that you keep getting these calls?
Ok. Mr. Blinders to tight you can only see one performance number at a time Director, sure thing. I get the same calls as everyone else, you keep saying, and I’m only an average agent by the one number you can see. Someday I hope to fuck you get blindsided right out of your job due to your inability to see anything except that one number. Obviously you don’t give a shit about your people other than the numbers (and how they affect your bonus), but at the same time, by every conversation I have had with you about pretty much every aspect of our daily operations, you don’t know shit about Statistics and how they work.
To my company: Your obsessive focus on ONE “customer satisfaction” number at the expense of every other metric is warping the fuck out of the entire system. People lie, cheat, fail to log, deliberately misspell names and email addresses, misclassify things and pass the buck at every opportunity to avoid having someone say they were dissatisfied with something that was totally beyond the control of your support reps, but will count against them and affect their earnings or limit their ability to get a promotion. It is well known but seldom spoken about, that the ONLY way you get 100% customer satisfaction for months in a row is by compulsive cheating, and yet this is what your system rewards. Congratulations for fooling yourselves so well.
Arrrggghhhh!!! Goddamnsonofabitchmotherfuckingcuntwhoreshitstain!!! My feet keep getting bit by fleas. Only my feet. Bit 7 times in the last 2 days. Fuck me. And they only go after my feet. It’s like they know if they ever show their fucking face I’ll squish them. Fuckers. :mad:
We’re dog sitting two dogs this weekend, on top of having our dog and a foster dog. Our dog is very well behaved (because we put so much time in to him) and the foster is surprisingly well behaved too.
These two other dogs, however, are horrid. In the spring, we had these two for 10 days, knowing full well how bad they were. We asked our friends if we could try some of the methods we use on them while they were away (like walking them every day, ffs), and they were excited that we offered to do this for them and give them a good head start as they’d had no luck. By the end of the 10 days, both were much better behaved, had about 90% and 95% recall, and were much calmer in the house. We spent an evening with our friends showing them everything the dogs had learned and they were stoked that the dogs responded so well and eager to get started on their own.
The summer went by and it sounded like all was good, and the wife was especially happy about how good they were off leash.
Well, it must have mostly been bunk. These dogs are worse then they were in the spring. They dropped the dogs off on Friday and ‘Sorry, they’re a little excited, we haven’t been able to walk them for three days…’ WTF? I take them on a walk and there is almost zero recall, they’re pulling on leash, they don’t respond to their names, and this is AFTER 45 minutes of running wild.
Add to that, my husband is hunting all weekend, so I’m in charge of this. I have to walk the two dogs on their own, then mine and the foster, because it’s just too much. Two hours for two walks!
Plus, the older of the two shit all over the kitchen last night. And they bark, bark, bark in the back yard.
And I just feel bad for these dogs. And myself. And I think I’m hormonal or just in a really shitty mood.