I am a patient person. It takes a lot to get me really angry

I am angry.

I am actually shaking with rage. I don’t know what I or anyone else is going to be able to do about it, but somebody better come up with something.  I have already escalated this up to the relevant manager.  I really should get my head, my Dean, and the relevant VP involved, but we’ll see.

I chose to go with optical scoring (mark-sense, or bubble sheets, depending on your background) for my ‘spring’ course, which consists of 17 sessions of 2 hours each. For the entire course.  Since that isn’t time to develop any useful skills, I decided to go with multiple choice, and as long as I was going multiple choice, I went optical scoring. 

In the past (with about 60 students) I have handed it my stack of things and gotten the phone call (or email) that things were ready by the time I got back to my office.  Not so this term.  Which I get is compressed. And it’s summer. And it’s no one’s job to sit around just waiting to put stacks of paper through a machine on the off chance someone will need it.  But at the worst of times, it shouldn’t take 48 hours to turn around a stack of papers.  Certainly not in the middle of a term.

But apparently that’s not how things are working now.  Twice now (of the 3 exams in my 17-session course with a measley 19 students in it), I have handed in my stack, and waited. And waited.  The first time I handed the things in on Tuesday morning and had to go down Thursday afternoon to check on things, since there was no notification that anything had been done.  I’m guessing that things actually did get done in 10 minutes, but for whatever reason nobody bothered to tell me about it.

Batch number two went in Wednesday morning. I didn’t have time on Friday to check up on them, and giving them the benefit of the doubt I waited to hear from them.  Until this afternoon, a full weekend after my students probably needed to see their grades if they were going to drop the course. Which I think they had to do by Friday.

I took a number, sat down, and waited for 20 minutes.  No one seemed to notice I was sitting there, let alone that I had a number.  I am a patient person, but this is ridiculous.  Fuming, I came back upstairs and wrote a very angry email detailing the situation. But then I couldn’t figure out who to send it to. I'm guessing these people know better than to put their org charts up so people can yell at them easily.

So I put in a service ticket.  Which laid out the sitatuation, and told them (at 4:10pm) that I didn’t think I needed to go down again, and someone can d*mn well bring my stack of papers up to my office before close of business.  No one did.

After which I initiated a chat, and got my old friend Josh, who is now my go-to guy down there, who went to look and sure enough, there was my stack of papers, sitting there, all ready to be picked up.  He checked the log and apparently someone emailed me something Wednesday morning (I’m guessing 10 minutes into the process) but it, like any earlier communications, did not go through.  He’s put in a ticket to see what the f*ck is going on. He has also escalated my original ticket to his manager.  

SOMEBODY better come up with an explanation as to what the F*CK is going on down there. FAST.  My last exam is on Wednesday, and if this doesn’t get cleared up, I’m going to have to stand in front of osmeone’s desk and do some actual yelling.  Maybe standing over them while they personally put my papers through the machine and hand the things back to me right then and there. 

And if some kind of vaguely satisfactory message is not waiting for me in the morning, believe me, people are going to be hearing about this.  My head and my dean, certainly.  If I can figure out which VP, them too.  I have so many better things that needed to be done this afternoon, including prepping for tomorrow’s class, than dealing with this CR*P.

So now, having gotten scores, figured out adjusted percentages, and put the whole thing into the LMS, now, almost two and a half hours later, I can maybe start getting to all the stuff I needed to do this afternoon.

I am still shaking.

Own Homership

12:30am, 2 May 2018
I own a home. Well, a condo, so a space in a cooperatively owned building. I moved in in July of 2015, so we’re going on three years now.

When I moved in, I took certain steps—fast, cheap, easy steps—to do something about light control and privacy, on the assumption that sometime when I wasn’t trying to move, or when I wasn’t broke, and had a little time to think about it, I would do something more permanent. So off Rob goes to Canadian Tire (Canada’s all purpose hardware/garden/kitchen/sports/automotive store) to buy tension rods and vaguely translucent shower curtains This solution served, mostly, until quite recently, when it turned out that vinyl shower curtains don’t like hanging in west-facing windows for three years. The one in my bedroom developed a crack, then a small hole. Well, someone is trying to tell me something.

Except I’m still basically broke, and trying hard to actually work productively prepping for a ‘summer term’ course that start on Monday among other things, so I don’t have a lot of spare time for mundane activities like laundry or cooking, let alone actually putting up curtains. I also am not sure, despite years of watching home improvement and design shows, that I know how to put up curtains. Slightly complicating the procedure, I do not at present own a working drill, or a sewing machine, or for that matter a working iron. I own several measuring tapes because a few weeks ago I got tired of never being able to find one and bought three fabric-style ones. Somewhere in this house there is a proper 15-meter jobber, and somewhere at work I think I 6-meter one, but I have no idea where exactly either is at the moment.

The good news is that at least psychologically I’ve been preparing for the day I get curtains. I’m pretty sure what color I want. I know I want blackout. So these in the second bedroom.
But hardware? Do I want to hang these loft style (with the rod going through tabs at the top, or from hooks, or clips? The IKEA ones have a fourth option, which is to run the rod through what amounts to hoops built into the top of the panel. The IKEA curtain rods are kind of limited, but silver, gray, or black finish? Do I need sheers, and therefore a double-curtain rod? Where does one place a curtain rod relative to a) the ceiling (or in my case the bulkhead, and b) the window frame?

Okay, I’ve worked out that last bit. The rod itself is supposed to be something on the order of 6-8 inches wider (that is 3-4 inches on either side) of the window frame. IKEA rods are pretty forgiving, in that the brackets go wherever they go, I presume into some kind of wall stud, and the rod just sits on them. Now, those years of home improvement and design shows tell me that there has to be a stud just on either side of the actual window. My problem is that I have 4-inch wide trim around my windows that I’m pretty sure are where the studs are, and so there’d be nothing immediately outside of them. So that means I need to be prepared with some kind of wall anchor. Which I am not confident about.

Now where the curtain rod goes depends partially on how the curtains are hung. So if I go with running the rod through the loopy things, I guess the very tippy top of the curtains can just brush the bulkhead. So I guess I should buy them, put the curtain rod through them, and just measure where their best placement is.

Nor am I entirely confident that I know how long they should be. I figure anywhere from ‘just covering the top of the baseboard’ to ‘almost touching the carpet’ will do, but I can’t tell how long that really is until I know how the curtains are hanging. Which means I probably have to figure out where to hang the rod, then hang the curtains, and measure, take the curtains down, and hem them.

This is problematic, not just because I’m freaking lazy, don’t currently own a drill, or anything I could hem curtains with, but because of one of my several ongoing ailments. Readers of this blog will recall that I had frozen shoulder in my right shoulder, which I’m happy to report has resolved and I have close to 100% of my movement back. The unfortunate thing is that my other shoulder has now gone, and which means raising my left arm too much higher than horizontal is pretty much impossible unless it’s Unless it’s straight forward, in which case I can get a little higher, depending on what I’m trying to do with my hand. But it ain’t fun.

So back to the bedroom curtain. As I was making my bed with freshly laundered sheets, I brushed up agains the brittle and falling apart shower curtain in my bedroom window and it disintegrated. Seriously, just fell apart. So there I am, 11pm or so, just wanting to make my bed and go to sleep, and I have to do something about my bedroom window dressing.

The only other curtain-like things in the house are a) the one in the second bedroom, which because I don’t often make contact with it is still intact but probably not in much better shape in any real sense;  b) the one in the second bathroom, which I suppose I could have pulled, but it’s beige and brown and anyway I’d just have to put it back when I was done, and c) a cheap vinyl shower curtain liner I bought as a backup to the one in the second bathroom. I opened up that once and realized it was seriously clear, which defeats the purpose of putting it in my bedroom window.

Ever the innovator, I decided to grab one of my old, rarely-if-ever-used-anymore, sheets. I tried a fitted sheet that for some reason didn’t fit on my bed anymore, but, well, it didn’t hang properly. So knowing that a flat sheet would be hard to get to stay up, I went with an old duvet cover. I could put the tension rod inside the duvet cover and get full coverage.

This tension rod isn’t spring loaded. It basically just unscrews to let you shorten or extend it, and screws to lock it at the length you choose. So you kind of have to be cagey putting it in because you have to get it tight enough to stay up because you can’t do much adjusting once you get it in place. So naturally at this point—apparently having not seen this far ahead—I discover I can’t grab hold of the curtain rod the the duvet cover to screw or unscrew it. I get the bright idea of climbing into the duvet cover with my curtain, but then I manage to jam the curtain rod so it won’t unscrew. (Just putting my hands around the curtrain rod and holding it and the duvet cover while the rest of me is outside the duvet cover is a non-starter, because I can’t hold the rod and the duvet cover over my head with my bad shoulder.)

Much comical hijinks ensue, what with climbing out of the duvet cover, getting the rod stuck in the duvet cover, stepping on the edge of the duvet cover, and so on. After about 15 minutes finally I get it to unscrew, get back into the duvet cover with it. It takes several tries to get it up because I’m in the duvet cover and can’t see what’s happening in the window frame. This isn’t comfortable at the best of times. Wrestling the whole thing cause serious pain, such that I had to stop and sit down a couple of times. Which means, of course, the curtain rod/duvet cover set up would move around weird so I’d have to wrestle it back into alignment so I could try again.

So an hour or so later, I have a workable temporary window cover. I hope it doesn’t have to last another three years, but I have a workshop on Thursday, a conference eon Friday and Saturday, and I start teaching my ‘Summer term’ course on Monday and I haven’t really made much headway into prepping that yet. So it won’t be until at least June probably, although some evening I may just bite the bullet and buy curtain panels and proper curtain rods and hardware. And a drill. And maybe some steam-a-seam and an iron.

In the time it took me to write this, it’s still up, so I’m hopeful it will at least last until morning. In part because I went in for my tire swap this morning and one of my summer tires was shot, so I needed to replace the two older ones, and they didn’t have any in. Which means I’m driving a loaner, which is kind of fun. Push button start (weird), rear-view camera (love), heated seats (shouldn’t have been necessary but actually today was nice). Only two doors, which means the door is heavy and long, so not great for my shoulder, or getting into the back seat, but whatevs. I don’t have to get back there. Which makes me want to update my car, but busy, sort of broke, and there’s more pressing matters, like bedroom curtains. (also the whole second bedroom, that that’s also another story.

Morning update: It’s still up, so it’s going to stay there until I get around to doing something about it, or it falls down again. Now, if anyone has any suggestions for the 8-foot sliding glass door assembly in the living room, let me know.