Freckles & Doubt

'Tis the season, by which I mean exams committee season, which means that it's the couple of hideous days during which I check and annotate board schedules while swearing at my life choices. I do not need to go through the motions of the annual rant, I shall simply reference it. Insert rant here. You know how it goes. In the Infinitesimal Department of Up, there are slightly more actual rumblings in the institution at large this year about automating the whole damned thing via the student database, mainly because it would be a side effect of doing it for registration purposes, and two years of student protests have rendered the upper echelons of management strangely interested in registration processes which don't actually congregate students in large crowds for protesters to disrupt. However, that's a Giant Programming Challenge Of Doom, and will take a minimum of several years even if they start now.

In the Infinitely Larger Department of Downside, the two hideous years of protests have generally had far from salutary effects. My weekend and Monday will be entirely full of board schedule checking to a far greater extent than usual, which is the product of discovering, yesterday evening, that academics had pulled out of three of the prelim committees. They apparently did this on Wednesday, and the administrator responsible for the committee scheduling simply didn't tell me. I found out last night in passing, accidentally, during the course of a query about something else. Apparently it hadn't penetrated the administrator's head that we have responsibilities for due diligence in these checks, and we can't simply truncate the committees. Someone has to take up the slack. That would be me. After a bit of a reshuffle, I now have two board schedules, the second being almost as thick as the one I was originally allocated, and which habitually takes me 8-10 hours to check.

I'm very tired and don't have the energy to be properly furious, but by gum if it weren't the end of the year I would be raging. Because, see, I do get it. It's been a year and a half of hell. Academics are exhausted, drained, alienated, pushed later into the year than they would be because of the delayed semester, and they are protecting themselves by simply saying "no". From their side it's justified: the whole protest debacle has been hell on everyone, requiring huge amounts of compensatory admin and emotional energy. But the thing is, the admin processes don't simply stop because everyone's tired. We have a faculty full of students awaiting their year-end coding fates, and we have a responsibility to maintain our processes and standards by doing the proper check. And academics are by the weird caste system of a university the ones who are more able to complacently retire into narcissistic individualism under pressure. They are protected by tenure, and the system always privileges their individuality, which is the realm of their intellectual and research life, over the mundane grind of maintaining the administrative system. So they say "no", and the system does what it always does, which is to make the administrators compensate, because they don't have the luxury of refusal.

It's been a hellish time to be in academia. We are stressing people way beyond acceptable boundaries, and we are going to see things snapping, mostly because people are simply going to up sticks and leave. Which is going to further compromise function and standards, which is going to see more people leaving. I hope like hell it isn't the beginning of the end.

My subject line is Franz Ferdinand, by processes of (a) alphabetical car music rotation, and (b) they're catchy. Memo to self, acquire more albums, I'd forgotten how much I enjoy them.

Lo these many moons if not many summers ago, I once posted about the House of Clocks, which appears to be an exercise in randomly bizarre creation of the more entertaining and off-the-wall sort. I stumbled over it again the other day, and was rather horribly struck by the sudden applicability of one particular exhibit, namely The Necromoniclock. Its provenance is appealing, chronicling the ability of the clock to jump instantly between locations: "Appearing on a sales-receipt at a pawnshop in Whiteville, North Carolina, the clock quickly jumps to a crude painting on a hide-drum in the Himalayas made only a week later. From there, the clock jumps to a yearbook picture in Cleveland, Ohio. A man raising pigeons on a rooftop in London gave an eyewitness account of the clock "hoverin', malicious-like" only two hours after the before-mentioned yearbook picture was reportedly taken."

This is all very well, but what is causing me active concern is the photograph.



That's my clock, people. The one I inherited from my dad, and which sits on my piano, and which has just struck nine to tell me I'm an hour and ten minutes late for my 10pm bedtime.

The House of Clocks cautions that "This clock seems to cut a swath of destruction everywhere it goes. Those who have spent time in its direct vicinity have complained of nosebleeds, murderous impulses, and an uncontrollable desire for polyester clothing. Large crowds of people have been driven to riot by its raucous chime. From botched plastic surgery to cattle mutilation (and in some cases both), from earthquakes to fallen souffles, doom and despair mark the passing of this clock in all its many incarnations."

This is, in fact, curiously reassuring. Now when I am hit by various incarnations of technojinx, ill health, uncaring academia or other crises, I have something to blame.

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* if my clock strikes twelve it's actually five to two. In retrospect, this should have been a warning.