Freckles & Doubt

I have spent the week running online orientation for our students' remote learning. which has been... challenging. Because we are in post-apartheid South Africa, which still has massive social inequalities (although, under late capitalism who doesn't, frankly?), and there is absolutely no way that a significant chunk of our students will have access to the internet or laptops or bandwidth or data in sufficient quantities to make remote learning easy or even possible, even before we get to the skills problem. (The very flawed survey they did a week or two back says that something like 30% of our students don't have suitable access). I keep having to deal with emails from students in rural areas who have had to travel from home to borrow a friend's phone in order to have either the data or the connection to send email, and are panicking about the absolute impossibility of learning online under those conditions.

And the whole thing has been complicated by my Cherished Institution, which is huge and slow and complacent, and has woken up to the exigencies of the situation like a particularly somnolent leviathan several hours after the alarm clock has given up beeping. Wits had data plans in place for their students ten days ago. We have spent the week rushing to roll them out, having pasted them in hurriedly when it became apparent that zero-rating certain key sites was insufficient, while frantic appeals mount in my inbox. We have sourced laptops for students who need them, but those are also only going out this week, and again with the desperate emails, and it's only for SA students, so international students are sitting in shitshows like Zimbabwe absolutely abandoned. Communication has been bad, reponsiveness has been bad, I really think the institution is floundering in the crisis.

My particular situation has been complicated by the need to do curriculum change remotely, except that the registrar's office wants students to submit forms through the student database rather than by email, which is fine except that they have spent the last week and a bit assuring us that yes, they'll set it up and explain the process, and then not doing that. While the emails from frantic students desperate to drop courses pile up in my inbox. Are you sensing a theme here, with the inbox? I am doing a shitload of cut and paste, mostly placatory generalities and exhortations to be patient.

This all sounds rather dire, but actually mostly the orientation has gone well, I have assembled a kick-butt team (mostly grad students, because heaven forfend actual academics should actually put in any time) to reply to student queries, and the sites are nicely designed by the university's online teaching team. But I have started yet another Stardew Valley game, because Witcher 3 keeps making me do things I don't want to, and apparently I need to have a small corner of my life in which I can advance with measurable progress and which is absolutely under my control.

Bloody load shedding again, ye gods I hate living in a third world country. I am at the stage where I can tell that the lights are off when I get home by the quality of the alarm system's beep, it's a semitone lower when on battery power than it is when on mains. (I don't actually have perfect pitch, but I have sufficient musical training that I have about a 90% chance of hitting the right note on the piano to replicate one I'm randomly singing. And the alarm beep is by now extremely ingrained after five years in this house).

This morning's planned power cut is going to add a new dimension of difficulty to the day's deadline, today being Absolutely Positively The Last Day for late registration or change of curriculum, which means we'll infallibly have a rush of disorganised dilatory students trying to sort their lives out. I have been sending "riot shields and brace!" sorts of messages to my advisor squad, hopefully I am being overly pessimistic. But I don't think so. The combination of Gen Z individualism and just-post-adolescent lack of perspective means that students are extremely likely to assume that a 4pm deadline means that they can arrive at one minute to four and be assisted. The real-life practical implications of a bureaucratic process apparently don't actually occur to them, and obviously advisors and administrators are droids or golems who don't have a home life and can simply stick around until all students are assisted. Bleah.

It occurred to me this morning that it's extremely telling that one of my recurring typing blind spots, as in a word I reliably mistype every time I use it, is "curriculum".

(Subject line from the Fratellis, "I've been blind", which was playing in the car this morning, and which I shall endeavour not to read as a commentary on my unaccountable continued existence in this bloody job). And now I have to post this quickly before the power goes. Sigh.

Favourite instance of student narcissism this week: it's 6.30am today, I have come up to campus early (for the sixth day in a row) to catch up with emails. There's one in my box, sent just after midnight, in which the student asks for late registration information, stating, with some indignation, that she emailed the relevant administrator last night but has not received a response, and please sort this out for her, time is running out. She genuinely seemed to expect an instant answer last night, and is annoyed and frustrated that it has not materialised.

I realise that this is the response of someone very young who has grown up with cellphones and instant connectivity to her social circle, but it baffles me a little that she's so sheltered she has not worked out the difference between social and institutional contact. Are working hours not a thing any more? Apparently not, given that I'm here at 6.30, after all. Notwithstanding which, she's going to have to make some painful adjustments to the working world, is all I can say. Hopefully my slightly snippy response will help with that.

Orientation programme 2 starts today, so hooray for four hours of giving presentations, followed by an afternoon of registration advice, rinse and repeat tomorrow and Friday. I am rapidly approaching the "chewed string" level of exhaustion. But Friday is the peak, it gets easier thereafter, once orientation is over. I will survive. *channels Gloria Gaynor*. Bugger, now I've earwormed myself. Probably you too, she says, fiendishly changing her subject line. Heh.

Ho, hum. *brushes cobwebs off journal and carefully relocates spiders*. I appear to have, um, disappeared for six months or so, possibly to indulge in a mid-life crisis as the big 50 rolled around, or possibly that's just coincidental. At any rate, my somewhat belated New Year's Resolution is to try and blog again, on the usual grounds that it's good for me and takes me the fuck out of myself, which may be necessary as my pestilent hell-job pushes me further and further into my shell, socially speaking. Turns out emotional energy is both (a) necessary for socialising, and (b) routinely swallowed up by narcissistic student vampires, self-absorbed academics and other occupational hazards of the academic life. Ho, hum.

I am doubly resolved upon journalling as my emotional support found family, namely jo&stv, have relocated with commendable efficiency to New Zealand, leaving me with something of a void to fill. New Zealand appears to be cool and green and sane and small, and thus diametrically opposed to almost all the aspects of South Africa in general and Cape Town in particular which are most getting up my nose at the moment, which is most of them, so I am jealous and more than slightly resolved to try and follow them if humanly possible.

Which will happen, alas, only when the current horrors of the registration/orientation season have abated somewhat, i.e. in about three weeks' time. Yesterday's first day of registration, happening simultaneously with the last day of the orientation programme, necessitated an 11-hour day which started with a batch of emails from academics who, having ignored my increasingly frantic pleas for three weeks, chose the morning of the actual presentations to inform me they refused to be recorded while speaking, thus screwing nearly terminally with a careful programme of student access. It continued with venue confusion, non-appearing presenters, handbook errors, and shoes which hurt my feet increasingly as the day's scurrying around progressed. It ended on a spectacularly low note when, at 5.30 in the evening, an hour after the university admin offices have officially closed, a very large male student followed me into my deserted and darkened offices, demanded, despite my protestations of complete exhaustion, that I make some complicated curriculum checks to sign a form for him, ignored my refusal and my request for him to email me the details so I could do the checking over the weekend, ignored four separate requests for him to leave my office, and loomed in the doorway refusing to leave until I succumbed to a panic attack. At which point, as I crouched on the floor shaking, hyperventilating and sobbing uncontrollably, he told me that my behaviour was unacceptable and he would inform management, and left to complain about me to the Dean, who he cornered in the foyer as she was leaving and ranted at for half an hour, blocking the building exit so I couldn't leave without passing him. I eventually staggered home in, shall we say, something of a state, and have spent the day mostly not moving from the sofa and aching in every muscle. I am hoping that the whole debacle at least means this reg season can only improve.

So. I am not at all sure if anyone is still reading such dreadfully retro and passé things as blogs, but I'm back and shall try to remain so. Watch this space.

I am apparently feeling Hamletesque, i.e. melodramatic and slightly doomed, and as though my entire society is permeated throughout by futility and rot. Mood. My helltime of year officially starts tomorrow, when the first orientation programme kicks off, but in fact, it started two weeks ago, when I went back to work, the last week of which has been 10-hour days as I try to fit three weeks of preparation into two, as a result of the inscrutable demon powers of university management having randomly started the semester a week earlier than usual. Not only do I have less time, but large swathes of academia are still on holiday, so a significant proportion of vital logistics emails are dropping into the void like meringues into a black hole, vanishing without echo or response.

I am curiously unaffected by this. Usually I would be desperately micro-managing to make sure the clockwork of orientation and reg are grit-free and well oiled, and becoming increasingly stressed by non-responses and admin meltdowns that appear to threaten the juggernaut mechanism. This time I appear to be shrugging; I honestly don't care if it isn't perfect, as long as it more or less works. I am inclined, on the whole, to think that this is probably a healthy response in many ways, and indicative of the fact that, despite my state of career paralysis and inability to identify and power towards any new goal, I have at least achieved something in that I am increasingly less invested in this job's demands and outcomes. Because, hell, if nothing else, that restores some kind of balance in mirroring the extent to which my Cherished Institution is sure as hell not invested in me.

By way of balm and soothing, and incidentally my mandated Proof of Life and Cuteness to phleep&jo, her previous owners, have a cute picture of my cat. She very much enjoyed the gaps that occurred in my shelving as a result of the merry throw-out I had over the Christmas break.

Life feels a bit apocalyptic at the moment, I will probably be having more of those dreams. While it's pleasantly damp and cool in Cape Town and water restrictions have been relaxed a bit, the equal and opposite reaction has been Eskom running out of power - again - and implementing load shedding - again - without warning - again. I mean, they publish it on their website, which no-one ever reads until the lights go out, or at least once the lights have come on again after going out. And they randomly switch between Level 1 and Level 2 - also without warning - which is particularly rife with complication given that the WhatsApp group for my street is prone to excitably and incoherently giving each other conflicting information about which zone we're actually in, which when read off against shifting load shedding statuses can completely obscure all logic and sense for days at a time. Honestly, my immediate environment could probably be serviceably choreographed as French farce right now. I try to plot when the lights are going to die, which they reliably don't when I expect it and do when I'm not expecting it, at which point I sigh, grab a torch and/or the gas stove for tea-making purposes, and hope to hell that the fanfic up on my Ipad at this precise moment is at least one of those 80-000 word epics which will keep me going for a bit.

Load shedding also, of course, happened on campus bang in the middle of our exam committee frantic period, giving us two and a half key hours in which administrators couldn't upload progression codes. Fortunately the essentially reactionary and analogue checking process involves giant printed board schedules and a pencil and the building has large windows, so some aspects of the whole edifice remained functional. But it's an index to the essential insanity of the season that I am, for once, grateful that my annual rant about how this whole process should be done more accurately and less exhaustingly by computers, has never borne fruit. We'd be completely screwed if it had. As it is, I am at the stage of slurring and noun loss which has forced me to reassure three separate colleagues this week that I'm not actually drunk, promise, just extremely fatigued, but the whole thing has been organised with ruthless efficiency and we are on track for final committees tomorrow.

In the middle of the post-apocalyptic whole, it's been particularly surreal to watch the abstract collapse of Tumblr, which has been my fandom and media home, if only in a strictly onlooker capacity, for six or seven years now. The venal and ham-fisted incompetents who contrive to run the site in the teeth of their own unfitness have banned NSFW images, with NSFW being defined in essential heterosexualist, gendered, puritanico-capitalist terms and implemented by an automated algorithm apparently conceived of and executed by actual chimpanzees. They want, of course, to make sure they keep on making money out of the site by selling ads and having the (awful) app in the Apple store. They have shot themselves in the foot with a small tactical nuke, taking out as collateral damage a whole thriving, interconnected and delicate ecosystem of fans, artists, small businesses and social-justice-focused communities who have made Tumblr into a vital living space despite everything the owners (Yahoo) have done to try and sabotage it. Not everyone on Tumblr is into porn or erotica or explicit fanart, but its free expression is a weirdly important thread in the whole ideological identity of the site.

I mean, capitalism is stupid and short-sighted, we know that. It goes for the easy short-term profit in defiance of long-term damage. But what the hell are these idiots even thinking, to alienate their user base like this? They are ejecting, effectively, their actual product. People are making migration plans in droves. (Many of them are coming here to Dreamwidth, which is a silver lining for me because I prefer to blog in this sort of environment and have never quite dared fling myself into the Tumblr stream, it scares me). There is no point in being "safe" for ad sales if the 10 million users have evaporated in shocked distress. Tumblr has its issues, with its community identity as much as with its owners, but its flow and focus and discourse are unique, and they broke it. I am very sad.

(My subject line is New Model Army, because the current state of my personal zeitgeist is tending a bit to the post-punk).

I'm a Commissioner of Oaths in my employment capacity, as a result of the fact that my Cherished Institution requires CoO certification for anyone above a certain payclass. Generally I don't have to do much with my Madly Official Stamps, since, while the institutional Powers That Be do generate a list of available commissioners, they only seem to advertise it in a locked filing cabinet in a basement somewhere behind a sign saying "beware of the leopard", with the net result that few tragically uncertified students actually work out I'm available. However, there's been a slightly odd rush of certification requests in the last few days. Either they've fired the leopard, or something about the approaching end of year brings people out in documentary hives.

The certifications of copy are dead routine, and, as I just said to the nice young man whose certificates I stamped, probably among the easiest things that students could possibly ask me to do. What is more difficult is the commissioning of a document, which is the whole sworn oath thing where I'm attesting that the signature on the document is that of the person in my office who is also the person appearing in the identity document they've given me as proof. Which is a madly ritualistic bit of legal wossname where I actually have to administer an oath, and always makes me feel as though I should be wearing a gown and wig and breaking out the more cumbersome sort of legalistic jargon. (Even though I always, without fail, default to the "truly affirm" version rather than the "so help me God" one, on the grounds that someone else's relationship with God is none of my business, and also that the invocation of a deity doesn't assist the integrity of my participation in the slightest being as how I don't believe in him).

I don't have to commission documents too often, and at least two of the occasions where people have arrived in my office with a commissioning request, I've had to gently decline. Both were fellow staff members, who wanted me to commission a document on behalf of an absent family member, and both of whom, while they didn't say anything explicit, managed to convey by generally huffy body language their annoyed incredulity at the fact that I wouldn't just stamp the damned things already, good grief, despite the inarguable absence not just of the vital personage concerned, but of every sort of verifiable element to which I'm supposed to be attesting.

Lawful Good doesn't work like that. I have a stamp which says I've verified things to my own satisfaction, and a quite clearly written and unequivocal guideline document which lays out exactly what I'm supposed to be verifying, and I'm quite frankly buggered if I'm going to make a mockery of the system by using my powers for anything other than their intended purpose. What the hell, even. How dare you expect it of me.

Dear attempted-falsifying colleagues, in that momentary drawing of lines you tried to implement, where you and I were comrades standing against the giant mechanisms of meaningless bureaucracy, you have badly misunderstood my position in the whole thing. I'm not on your side of the line. I frankly resent that you think I might be, particularly given that both of you are higher ranking in institutional terms than I am, and the whole momentary-comradeship thing elides a power balance that might conceivably be read as pressurising a junior staff member. I get that you are not attempting massive fraud, and this is convenience, and your family member almost certainly is who you say they are, and probably even signed this. But no. It might not matter in the greater scheme of things, but the integrity of my word damned well matters to me. We live in a world where, globally, systems are being systematically screwed by this sort of personal-convenience thinking. This is a tiny meaningless microcosm, but I will have no truck with it. You want my signature, you take the system on board.

I may, however, have vaguely wished I was at several points over the last few weeks, on the general grounds that it might be pleasantly restful. This has been a complete hellseason for registration, I have worked a high proportion of 12-hour days for the last month, and straight through most weekends. Particular lowlights have included:

• having to floor manage registration simultaneously with advice and orientation because the designated manager was off sick and there were no alternative arrangements or anyone else willing to take responsibility;
• the arrival of the faculty handbooks, necessary for students for registration, with mathematical precision an hour and a half after the last registration session had ended;
• an unceasingly flow of angry students expecting to see their degree status updated to "qualified", which it hasn't been owing to administrative meltdown in the admin office, and having to re-check and re-submit the damned things, sometimes for the third time;
• the regular late arrival of registration forms to registration sessions because the whole responsibility has been devolved onto temps, which means my advisors twiddle their thumbs for half an hour;
• my digestion's response to all this, which has been two weeks of nausea and a week of heartburn, including what I thought on Sunday was actual gastric 'flu but mercifully doesn't seem to be the bug which has laid low most of my staff and a swathe of students over the last two weeks, even if my version has made me feel like hell and rendered my eating minimal and pale;
• the weird evangelical student household neighbours over my back wall intensifying their evangelical activities from "really bad singing" to include sudden outbreaks of speaking loudly in tongues with the living room windows and door wide open at 6am as well as 7pm, and I have to say, that shit - unified, continuous wordless babbling from a dozen people - is creepy at the best of times and downright terrifying when you're half asleep;
• Jyn's new crusade, which is to climb through and utterly destroy if at all possible the front blinds, which are starting to look bent, bont and splugged, necessitating me erupting from the sofa at intervals to shout at her (she knows exactly what she's doing, she looks at me, narrows her eyes and then deliberately does it again);
• Teen Wolf's season 3 featuring a big bad played by the voice of Dragon Age's Fenris, who is one of my favourite go-to romances and whose decontextualised appearance in the inverse moral position is giving me conniptions.

I am a piece of chewed string. Once this week's change of curriculum is over, I shall go and see my doctor, and hope like hell I can gently prod her into booking me off work for a couple of weeks on grounds of general exhaustion. And the faculty may slide gently off the mountain and into the sea in my absence, I care not.

On the upside, I have progressed to the second stage of a job application with Minerva, in that they're asking for references and what have you; while I still darkly suspect I will not ultimately be offered it, given that they have the length, lingth and longth of the oversubscribed American academic wasteland to draw from, it's obscurely cheering to feel that at least I'm vaguely competitive. 

Oh, joy, 'tis the season, fa-la-la-la-la. Not, in fact, the thrice-dratted Xmas season, although of course it is, and promptly with the dawning of November supermarkets have blossomed forth in all the usual seasonally-inappropriate merry snow imagery in the midst of African summer, glitzy Northern Hemispherical Christmas trees, and the usual quotient of bad syrupy R&B covers of hackneyed Christmas carols given additional terror by the robotic brassiness of autotune. (How Much I Hate Auto-Tune, a rant in 56 parts. I'm saving it.)

No, the season to which I refer is exam season. Lectures ended on Friday, exams start on Wednesday, and the 5 student consultations I've held in the last three hours are all logged in my logbook with "fail fear" in the "Notes" column. They're all about to fail some or all of their courses this semester. This will variously prevent them from graduating, lose them their funding or doom them to academic exclusion. I have patiently strategised a variety of responses with a variety of desperate students whose affect ranges from fatalistic through resolved to extravagantly miserable. Three of them were in tears.

To the various individual woes (mostly anxiety/depression with a side order of death in the family) is added the very general woe of, yet again, student protests. Some lecture disruptions last week, lectures suspended for a couple of days. The bulk of our departments have thrown up their hands and given up on lectures in the last two weeks of term, electing to examine an incomplete syllabus. (Some of them, cunningly predicting just this, front-loaded their syllabus and devoted the last two weeks to revision, thus neatly dodging the protest upshot). We are supposed to have delivered the rest of the semester by "blended learning", which is the VC's favourite buzzword and which is frequently deployed in a talismanic sense which utterly disregards the realities of the situation, viz. a proportion of academics utterly unable to deliver it to a proportion of students utterly unable to access it owing to a failure of both skills and technological infrastructure.

But the crowning glory is the tent. The protesters are apparently hell-bent on disrupting exams. They spent chunks of last week disrupting tests as well as lectures. Security in riot gear, with shields, have been lurking in rows outside the main exam venue all last week. The VC's somewhat bizarre response to the exam disruption threat, which he has implemented apparently in the teeth of disagreement from the entire senior leadership group and the council of Deans, has been to hire a large tent, which has been constructed on the rugby fields, and in which all exams will take place in a "controlled" environment. I think the idea is to use the rugby fields because you can completely surround and cordon off the tent, although quite why you can't do that to the Sports Centre is not entirely apparent. The Sports Centre, at least, has solid brick walls. Threats to burn down the tent apparently popped up on Twitter within an hour or two of the relevant press release.

Last night's usual Sunday dinner featured three denizens of my Cherished Institution, and we ended up rather drunkenly strategising ways to burn down the damned tent, now, ourselves, before protesters do it on Wednesday when exams start. The plan involved layers of diversion and archers with fire arrows, probably deployed from the roof of the nearest res. Its advantage is that the conflagration will happen when there aren't actually any students in the tent, because frankly we're beginning to worry that escalating protests are going to inevitably lead to grievous bodily harm and/or actual death. And you have to ask yourself: at which point in all this management fuckwittery does your own dutiful attempt to comply with management's more deranged directives actually become complicity? At which point do you simply refuse to take part? If a student is badly injured and you told them they should go to the exam, are you in some way responsible? It's not a happy thought.

My subject line is the title of my third-favourite track on the new Magnetic Fields album.