Freckles & Doubt

oh thank the cosmic wossnames, this third attempt at new glasses actually works, I can both read and see the computer screen. Conversely, distance is now a bit fuzzy, but I suppose I can use the previous, inadequate pair (no close vision, also hurt my nose) for driving and watching movies. Not that I ever watch movies any more. Or drive, very much. Yay, pandemic. Anyway, I thought the poor little optometrist lady was going to weep with joy when I pronounced these ones fit for purpose, I shudder to think how much the two remakes have cost them. They've been very sweet about it.

The lens prescription is now fine, but this pair was hurting the hell out of my ears, and it's all been a bit of a revelation: I have never before in my life had a glasses prescription which wasn't correctly made, or frames which were actually uncomfortable to wear. I've always been able to put on a new pair of specs and hie me into the wild blue yonder, rejoicing in vision. Multifocals are, apprently, a bugger. Fortunately the amazing optometrist lady was able to bend the arms into a shape which no longer hurts, so we are now good to go, but really either I've been incredibly lucky with prescriptions for my entire life, or this particular one was jinxed. Probably both.

I have been not really posting because the last two weeks have been ungodly and horrible, I worked a 14 hour day last Sunday trying to finish up late reg submissions, I have never seen students so disorganised. On top of the blissful student disregard of deadlines, the already excessive challenges of remote reg in two weeks shorter than we had last year, were sharply exacerbated by, yup, yet again, campus closing down for student protests. About fees, again. I am, however, pleased to report that campus being blockaged and closed down, and lectures being interrupted by an SRC hellbent on preventing the academic year from continuing while any student was denied registration because of fee debt, is a lot less stressful when one is working remotely. Also, technology helps: while the protesters tried to disrupt live online lectures (by singing, in at least one case), a quick round of academics swapping tips on Mute All quickly settled the hash of that particular outbreak.

Now it's all gone suspiciously quiet, awaiting, I think, the Council meeting tonight which will decide if some, or all, of the fee blocked students will actually be allowed to register. If no, all hell will probably break loose with further blockades and protests. If yes, all hell will break loose as we suddenly have to register nearly two hundred additional students two weeks into term, using an exhausted advisor cohort, in as short a time as possible, since we're already a week and a half into term. Yay.

This has probably been the most exhausting and difficult reg season I've ever experienced, the volume of email I've had to deal with, and the levels of bewilderment and disorganisation of students, have been unparallelled. The legacy, I think, of two years of remote learning, and a growing and horrible detachment from the processes of academia on all levels. Our systems were not designed for this, and have adapted only partially, reluctantly and inadequately.

It's Monday, time for a rant list! Things That Have Got Right Up My Nose, and which I require to be blasted by the Cosmic Wossnames forthwith:

• The weather. 39 degrees on Saturday, 37 yesterday. Today is only supposed to be 26, but my otherwise much appreciated little house tends to trap temperature extremes lovingly and recreate them for the next couple of days, so it's still like a cross between Durban and an inefficient oven cooking meringues up in here. I have adopted my mother's cunning recommendation, which is to waft around the house wrapped in a voluminous cotton scarf which I dip into cold water at approximately hourly intervals. But it melted my chocolate oranges on Saturday. Not cricket.
  
• My fucking fancy new bifocals, which do not focus on either the screen or anything for close reading, and moreover hurt my nose. I have had them remade once already (removed prisms, no dice), and am currently wearing the old ones (too weak, scratched to hell) in order to deal with Registration Meltdowns, while the long-suffering optometrists make up a new pair with a new prescription and new frames. We have Ship of Theseused my new specs, in fact. If the new ones don't work I will, recking not the expense, be ordering a brand new pair of office specs, valid reading and computer screen only, and wearing the others, possibly alternately or, like Professor Branestawm, all at once, for distance. Phooey.
  
• Student reading comprehension, which is adding new levels of futility and despair to my tech support function, and today presented me with a student offering me a screenshot of the apparently opaque and incomprehensible final registration screen, with a big blue "Submit" button and an instruction to "Click submit to finalise your registration submission", and an innocent query about why their registration has not been finalised. Because, I patiently point out, they have clearly not clicked "Submit". Oh, they say, they didn't realise. Aargh.
  
• By the terms of my Ancient Treaty with Scroob, Parcelforce and all its works.

Things which have mitigated the rant-worthy list, above: the charmingly eccentric spelling tendencies of the student whose registration form specified yesterday, in cheerful all caps, a course called "ATHMORSPHERIC SCIENCE".

I am, once again, a very tired thing in the limp chewed string category, it's been a long year, and one very full of emergencies and makeshifts and adaptations, all demanding unlikely quantities of my time and mental energy. It was exam committee season last week; over four days, including the weekend, I individually checked around 1500 student records. (With the added minor challenge that my wildly expensive brand spanky new bifocals weren't working, and wouldn't let me focus on close stuff, to the point where I had to revert to the old specs and send the new ones back for remaking, apparently without the prisms, which are giving me auras and headaches.) And the exclusion review committee meeting, in which we lovingly review every excluded student in the faculty and try to find ways to readmit them without the whole appeal thing, took out half the subsequent weekend, with 7 hours of depressingly disastrous records on Friday and 4 on Saturday morning, so I feel I am somewhat justified in being wiped.

I really wanted and needed to be on leave this week to recover, but can't, because results were released to students yesterday, and since 7.30am yesterday I have answered over a hundred desperate student emails panicking about exclusions and failures and insufficient accolades and what have you. About one in 20 of which are genuine errors, and the rest are causing me, in my slightly punch-drunk state, to type up replies which unequivocally deconstruct their attempts to graduate despite a pivotal failed course, while gently crooning to myself, to no fixed tune, "There are ruuuuuules, and they apply to yooooooooou".

This is a slightly unhappy, welcome-to-adulthood sucker-punch these poor kids are facing. Most of them wade right in with righteous indignation, insisting that there must be some way around it, it's only one course, can't they do it concurrently with postgrad, or get a rewrite, or a re-mark, or just count up their credits instead of their courses, because Plans next year, and Money, and Aargh. And the answer, unfortunately, is No, because there are Ruuuuuules, and they apply to Yooooooou. And I think the resulting outrage and sense of victimhood is because of two things: (a) their insufficiently developed organs of perspective, which as Just Post-Adolescents they are still develping, so that The End of Their World is still The End of THE World, and how can anyone not see the importance of accommodating them. Compounded by (b), late stage capitalism and consumerism, they are the Customer, there is always a way to accommodate them, they've paid for this, how dare!

Which, no. Welcome to the cold hard reality of adulthood, rules still apply. Like, (for everyone except actual billionaires, about whom the less said the better), gravity, and taxes, and speeding fines, and having to go to work in order to eat. And, in fact, having to meet the degree requirements in order to graduate. Adulthood is in many ways amazing, and I wouldn't go back to teenagerhood for anything except an absolute guarantee I could keep my memories and adult perspective and replay it properly like a botched video game run, but sometimes adulthood, in terms of consequences, simply sucks. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it does.

And it may be some small consolation that, if adulthood sometimes sucks, at least we are all in this together, no-one is immune. COVID doesn't help in the Adulthood Sucks stakes; my mum hasn't been able to visit for two years, my sister and niece are currently down with it (fortunately very mildly), so Christmas is cancelled. Which is not as dire as it sounds, my family's never been big on festive wossnames, I'm really not much bothered by that aspect. Which is just as well, I have to spend most of the break catching up the orientation prep I haven't had time for, in time for the new academic year and reg season to hit in January. I'll rest when it's all over. Sometime in March. Aargh.

• 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.

There is a student in my inbox with whom I have had an email exchange lasting (counts them...) NINE emails, during which I have tried patiently and unavailingly to get him to tell me a single, simple fact: what exact curriculum change is he trying to make? He has managed, over the repeated emails, to completely ignore this, sending me cheerful two-line answers in which he variously tells me all the inventively wrong things he has tried to do to make this mysterious thing happen and which haven't worked, and I cannot tell him what the right thing to do is because he WILL NOT TELL ME WHAT THE CHANGE IS! Given that I am sending increasingly annoyed emails with careful caps, underlining and bolds to try and make him focus on the question, I am being left floored and slightly breathless at the magnitude of the reading comprehension fail he is demonstrating. Honestly, he'll never survive a liberal arts degree if he can't read a simple question. And I'm very close to the point, given my current 12-hour days and 300-odd emails daily, of simply not answering any more. Because really.

Registration continues to melt down gently, we now have 70% of students having submitted, two days before the deadline, and have processed 65% of those. The proliferation of both reg submissions and queries to my inbox is being echoed, in more concrete terms, in my home environment, by various insectoid and other incursions, which likewise give the impression of scurrying masses imperfectly contained and erroneously misdirected. The cockroach outbreak has, merciful heavens be thanked, been more or less contained by the efforts of the landlord, who replaced the rotted sink backboard (thereby revealing millions of the little fuckers nesting madly in the rotting wood, as I had darkly suspected) and then made merry mayhem with cockroach insecticide all down the skirtings. I have a few desperate stragglers, but they are punch-drunk and staggering, and I dispatch them with extreme prejudice, and the kitchen no longer skitters when I switch on the light suddenly at 2am owing to sleepwalking, weird noises or the sudden need for the loo.

The more recent problem is the hitherto flourishing violet I had in a pot in the passage, which suddenly, a week ago, went all lacy-leaved on me instead of its previously happy and stalwart green, and I picked a couple of caterpillars off it, muttered strange gardening oaths, and though nothing more of it. Except the leaves continued to get lacier, and I rooted through them a bit to find more caterpillars, unearthed one or two, and eventually got the hell in and rustled the whole plant vigorously. Upon which there was a sort of squidgy, squirming shower, and about 20 browny-green caterpillars in assorted sizes, from mini to Economy, were left writhing disconsolately on the tiles. I have done that twice more on two subsequent days, to diminishing returns, and I think I may finally have eradicated them all, but really. Butterflies are pretty and all, but there are Limits.

Oh wait. 9-email student has just got back to me, via a futile and error-ridden detour through the Law faculty, with the final, grudging admission that he wants to move to Law, and a wild and exaggerately favourable reading of his eligibility for same in terms of school-leaving scores. I have disabused him of his various misconceptions, and am left reeling slightly at the though of the havoc his particular brand of wilful misreading could wreak on the innocent law profession. Lawks.

(My subject line is, of course, the Inchworm song, which I know through Danny Kaye on the Muppets, and re-watching the gentle sweetness of which has just soothed a lot of my irritation. On Youtube. My caterpillar infestation isn't nearly as cute.)

Not my favourite moment in completely not my favourite time of year in a completely ungodly horrible year in anyone's terms anyway.

We are
(a) running remote registration too slowly, because students don't follow instructions, so we have processed a third of our returning student cohort in three weeks and have only a week left to process the other two-thirds, which explains everything you need to know about my 12-hour days, and
(b) last night, after two weeks of wrangling in which the Law faculty tried to make me do the data crunching and I, fortunately backed by the full and pleasingly territorial might of our faculty manager, refused, I could finally release the list of students accepted for the Law major, about which said students have been bugging me with increasing fervour for three weeks, only to find that
(c) when I woke up this morning, it was to an inbox full of indignant students not selected for Law despite clearly meeting requirements, because the Law faculty, in a probably unconscious display of the if-I-do-it-really-badly-they-won't-make-me-do-it-again trope so beloved by domestic spats the world over, had completely screwed up the data, at which
(d) my internet promptly went out, which after half an hour on the helpline and crawling under the desk to diagnose the fibre box, and establishing that Octotel was suffering from either "problems" or "scheduled maintenance", was accompanied by
(e) the water going off, because the landlord spent two days this week rendering my hideous workload even more hideous by banging, scraping and SOMEONE IN MY SPACE KILL IT WITH FIRE, in order to install a prepaid water meter, for which
(f) he gave me absolutely no documentation, which means I've spent odd moments in the frantic week trying to work out how to prepay on insufficient info based purely on the brand name of the water meter packaging he left in my recycling, and working through the tiny prepaid amount he actually preloaded into it, culminating in
(g) this morning: no water, no internet, so no way of getting water, and no way to access the steadily increasing public relations disaster in my inaccessible inbox in addition to the massive pile of work I have to do this weekend.

Fortunately the internet came on again at lunchtime, and unlogjammed the logjam, so I am watered, internetted and have with consumate skill and dexterity placated the students by blaming Law entirely and being very sympathetic. (They're nice kids. I posted the list the instant it was finalised, which was at about 9pm last night, and three separate students emailed me a heartfelt "thaaaaannnk yooouuuuu!" with varying vowel extravagances in both the thanks and my name, they have all been incredibly anxious about this, hence the late night announcement). And I have to say, typing up the above Itemised List of Inexorable Doom made me giggle hysterically, because good grief.

But I am a very, very tired thing. My Monty Python subject line serves to describe both my life in general, and my voice in particular, which is evincing that gravelly octave-drop so characteristic of exhaustion. Come, oh, the end of March, when this is all over, I am going to assume the horizonal position and not move for several years.

Well, that was illuminating. Yet another interminable university-level meeting. During which a higher-up notes in passing, as a frank, manly confession which does not at all suffice to compensate for the actual transgression, that if there is one area in which the upper management of our Cherished Institution has not really delivered adequately during the Current Crisis, it has been in communication, both to its students and its staff.

Armoured as I was by my microphone and camera both being off, the effrontery of this gratuitous understatement caused me to laugh out loud. Still laughing, I rolled my chair back from the desk and proceeded, to my own startlement, to degenerate into a sort of manic, bitter giggling which appeared to be entirely out of my voluntary control, and which persisted in an increasingly hyena-like manner until it rocketed into hysterical sobbing. All of which provided a fascinating counterpoint to the more-or-less irrelevant and pointless administrative wurbling as the meeting continued in the background.

I don't think I've every had full-blown hysterics before. It was illuminating. And surprisingly cathartic. And made me realise how precarious and misleading the calm, featureless nature of my working-from-home days must be, and how much my ongoing irritation with my Cherished Institution is actually quite profound. Under that surface, apparently, is lurking a buttload of stress and possible actual trauma. It's all very exhausting, and now I have a headache. The meeting having fumbled its way though circumlocution and repetition into something resembling an ending, I am now going to go and make consolatory and self-rewarding tiramisu. With berries, because I can.

On a happier note, this morning's 5.30am wake-up and happy two-hour lounge in bed with a cup of tea and two affecionate cats was enlivened by finishing Becky Chambers's The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which is an utterly charming space opera with nicely-realised alien races and an intensely millenial focus on found family, and which made me cry rather differently - the happy tears of response to a well-judged and ultimately uplifting emotional punch. I loved it, and have ordered all the available sequels. Do recommend.

Work is currently giving me strong and recurrent desires to run in tight circles, screaming and tearing my hair out. The only saving grace of interminable, tedious Teams and Zoom meetings (I had eight last week. EIGHT!) is that I can, when the level of fuckwittery reaches critical, double-check that I'm on mute and rocket into the garden in order to soothe my soul a bit by petting kitties, talking to the spring-burgeoned plant life, or, in extreme cases, pacing up and down swearing creatively and shaking my fists. One of these days I'm going to forget the mute-check and whichever meeting it is will be electrified by various iterations of "fucking x and fucking y and why the fucking fuck they can't just fucking z" from my general direction, muffled in the distance amid the plaintive meepings of cats.

A university is not an efficient thing, god wot. It's a giant bureaucracy existing perpetually in the middle of an extremely turgid identity crisis, with its competing "selling a thing" and "testing the competence of a thing" goals being, at times, mutually exclusive. Students are, somewhat complicatedly, both a client and a product, which is why the default state of university administrators of any persuasion is "borderline insane". At the best of times the modern university lumbers around like an unamiable academic dinosaur, trampling its own student clutches and being shrewdly stung at intervals by managerial wasps: managerialism, and the increasingly sublime disconnect between upper leadership and the mere peons labouring at the actual student coalface, has done horrible things to our functioning. In the particular case of my Cherished Institution this manifests as recursive, self-replicating committees which bumble blindly about in something like a Dickensian Chancery fog, wherein actual measurable achievement is obscured almost completely by confused and conflicting management dictates, administrative intractability, membership bloat, and descent into the default tragic academic hubris, viz. addiction to the sound of one's own voice.

Add to that a giant world-threatening epidemic and the need to translate, at short notice, absolutely all of our firmly in-person processes to the virtual, and it becomes almost impossible. Balancing the competing needs of COVID safety, academic quality assurance, student sanity and university solvency is not a realistic goal in a reality with the normal number of dimensions. Everyone is stressed, tired and panicking; the institution has always worked in very distinct faculty silos, so the challenges of each faculty are different, and apparently all of the attempts to resolve wildly differing problems have to be debated at length, with appropriate woe.

The response to difficult problems appears to be to throw more people at them. This means that almost every meeting has new members, who will infallibly derail procedures by revisiting and rehashing issues we actually dealt with weeks ago. I swear six out of last week's eight meetings spent four-fifths of their time solemnly reinventing the wheel, arguing about its colour, entering caveats about how many we needed on any given vehicle, and eventually discovering, with innocent surprise, the same thing that we realised last week, and the week before, and the one before that: that the reason why we can't reach agreement is because Humanities has a unicycle and Law is a sixteen-wheeler, and you can't treat either of them the same way you do Commerce's sexy sports car with its regulation four. The whole is complicated by the occasional infusion of directives from the managerial godly bods up on wasp Olympus, who have vaguely heard of this "wheel" concept and have decided there should be five and a half of them and they need to be triangular. And purple.

My second, well-developed coping mechanism, after the "run in circles in the garden, screaming" one, is to remain very quiet in meetings, and to placidly continue to develop the orientation and registration programmes I think will probably work best, ignoring all dictates from on high, and occasionally nicking good ideas from more sane colleagues. At infrequent intervals I erupt into the meeting with barely-restrained ire, delivering a few pithy sentences to point out exactly how (a) this is irrelevant, and (b) it was also irrelevant last week, when we beat it to death. I am collecting those happy little yellow Teams upvote thumbs as a faintly reassuring reminder that I am not, in fact, alone in the frustration.

But I have never been so tired. Apart from the futility and exhaustion of these meetings, they're lengthy and time-consuming and cut into the limited time I have to actually do all this real work. Aargh, is all I can say. Aargh.

Well, it's definitely been a week. We opened second semester change of curriculum on Monday, which necessitated designing and building a complete process for dealing with probably rather more than the usual thousand or so submissions (students are dropping courses like buttered toast) remotely rather than in person. This means that for the week I have been managing multiple processes, including training and individual tech support for both students and advisors, on multiple platforms, viz:

• the submission by students on the student database of change of curriuclum forms;
  
• the activities on the student database of 13 different advisors of varying levels of tech-savvy in checking and approving such forms (complicated and fiddly, because our database is Peoplesoft and doesn't do in one easy click what it can do in 12 obscure clicks and a sacrificial goat);
  
• since the database submission process doesn't allow for discussion with the student, the submissions by students on our web-based content delivery site of requests for individual curriculum advice;
  
• the submissions by students to the forum on our web-based content delivery site to ask quick/easy rules and process questions;
  
• the activities of 13 advisors of varying levels of tech-savvy in offering curriculum advice via the web-based content delivery system, according to a strict timetable and at two separate contact points;
  
• the submission by students via email of curriculum change queries which cordially ignore, or didn't read properly, the instructions I sent out regarding seeking advice via the above rather than me;
  
• reproachful alerts to advisor solecisms in processing from administrators via email;
  
• frantic technical or tech support queries from advisors via email;
  
• frantic technical or tech support queries from advisors via the advisor WhatsApp group;
  
• occasional frantic technical or tech support queries from advisors via phone call, because apparently WhatsApp isn't enough;
  
• occasional stop-gap Teams briefing sessions offering tech support via shared screens, to reinforce the training I gave them all last week, also by Teams, about which, hiss spit.

I am managing all of the above via the dubious assistance of a keyboard with a sticky letter T, which means that it only actually produces a T about half the time, and only if I hit it particularly hard. My level of stress is causing me to routinely misspell things, in particular my usual bugbear "curriculum", which I get wrong about half the time probably because of Freudian pressures (I have corrected it FOUR TIMES in this post alone). The lack of the T is adding a new dimension to this, most notably that my tendency to the classic internet "teh" instead of "the" is, sans T, causing me to sound unduly Canadian.

However! I am bloody but unbowed. The system is working, of a fashion, advisors are becoming rapidly more tech-savvy by processes of practice, hand-holding and main force and have been frankly lamb-like in keeping up with their duties, and my new keyboard arrives today. The gods willing and the creek don't rise (which it will, there's a major cold front in, for large tracts of yesterday it was raining horizontally), we may yet navigate this more or less unscathed. I cannot attest, however, to the probable state of my sanity or energy, I am exhausted. But, mostly, triumphant. I'll take it.

My desk chair arrived! choosing, of course, the one single stretch in the 8 hours of the working day when I was actually on a video call, which I suppose is the Cosmic Wossnames for you, but on the upside it wasn't actually a work call, I was catching up illegally with jo&stv on the grounds of, fuck, I worked one 12-hour Friday and one 7-hour Saturday weekend before last, the faculty owes me this.

So, desk chair. Not, in fact, eaten by eels en route, although I spent most of Monday and Tuesday darkly suspecting that eels had at least nibbled it, as it was new and spanky and adjustable and, despite frequent fiddling with multiple levers, bloody uncomfortable. Which turned out to simply be my butt and limbs adjusting to a different chair than the one I've sat in for a decade, who knew, because it's fine today. Possibly I'm just getting old. Sigh.

It occurs to me that the 12-hour Friday and 7-hour Saturday in fact handily explained my absence from Teh Intarwebs for ten days or so, we had a curriculum change deadline and the Dear Little Students, despite careful announcements and desperate pleas to the contrary, all piled up their submissions on the last day, concentrated in the last two hours before the deadline, leaving me with a hundred or so to process before Monday. I was really quite exhausted for most of last week. I enjoy working with students, really I do, they are bright and interesting and frequently lovely, but just-post-adolescent narcissism and the concomitant lack of development in the organs of perspective make them a little wearing at times. Yes, in the abstract getting the form in twenty minutes before deadline is "in on time", but consider that this faculty contains over five thousand of you, if you all do it at once the system collapses. Sigh.

On the upside, @GinevraCat posted on Twitter this recipe for quick chocolate lava cakes, which I have just made myself for lunch, and bugger health food, anyway. Pro tip: it helps to actually include the egg, which I accidentally overlooked, first time round, leaving me with the interesting problem of how to extract the solidified chocolate tar from the bottom of the ramekins, it appears to have fused. I haven't achieved that kind of rookie baking fail since I was approximately a teenager, I have been cackling derisively at myself all afternoon. Good chocolate lava, though. Eventually.