things that are amusing me despite the current registration meltdown

[freckles_and_doubt]

• The student in my inbox with the gmail account which calls itself THE INTELLECTUAL PLATFORM.
• The student the other day who thanked me, somewhere in the middle of a 20-email conversation, for my "relentless patience".
• The student who has just emailed me with an absolutely beautiful typo, addressing me as 'Dead Mam'. Why yes, dear student. Yes, I am in fact currently dead. How did you know?
• The fact that we are dealing with online registration processes which entail putting submissions into different stauses, like INCOMPLETE and REVIEWED and ASSIGNED, and I keep getting Laundry Files flashbacks to occult situational codewords. If I put a student into SCORPION STARE status after their fifth illegal duplicate submission, a basilisk ray will erupt from their screen and turn them to stone.
• The emotional kickback to the fact that I have relaxed all self-imposed tea-imbibing restrictions, and am damned well drinking tea, Earl Grey, hot, whenever I feel the need, which is frequently. I was drinking too much and had limited myself to four cups a day, and it's amazing how much the lifting of that feels self-indulgent, and naughty, and luxurious. I will re-restrict when I am no longer working fourteen-hour days.
• The colleague who accused me, in the advisor chat the other day, of being "bergamotted to the eyeballs". He knows me well. I am missing my giant campus meeting mug, which is that one Claire gave me a couple of years back, and which holds about double the usual mug capacity and is inscribed "Fifty shades of Earl Grey". It has become a faculty landmark which causes much amusement in meetings.
• The extent to which load shedding, which seems to be a seasonal thing, we always get it around now, maybe the electricity migrates elsewhere in autumn, has become a relief and a reprieve instead of its usual irritation. If I have no power, I can't work. It's currently the only break I'm getting.

Term starts tomorrow, we are doing change of curriculum for another week, with some late registration owing to complete funding meltdowns at the government level. We are about 300 students under usual capacity, which after a COVID year is causing the faculty to wince in financial dread, but they may yet all rush to register late. The wholesale horrors of reg have been energised by the ongoing threat of yet more student protests, which gave me a small but perfectly formed wiggins on Friday when they manifested, but so far have not been major in our neck of the woods. Mostly they're angry at the government, anyway. Which, same.

I am Dead Ma'am. I am quite unbelievably exhausted, but it's nearly over.