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.