Freckles & Doubt

oooh, yes, this blog thing, yes. *blows dust off it in the traditional fashion*. I knew I was forgetting something. Well, probably I'm forgetting lots of things, on account of how it's been a hellish couple of months and I am exhausted enough to have a small, limp, cheesy sort of thing in place of a functional memory. But it's more or less over bar the irritating mopping up. I survived, by dint of two months with 10-hour days and no weekends off, the translation of registration for 5000 students and orientation for 1400 into brand new remote processes designed by a giant, slow, inefficient bureaucracy and implemented by self with hindrance from same during conditions of global pandemic. I didn't even kill anyone, although the temptation was enormous at several points. I also tallied up my overtime hours this week. From the middle of January to the middle of March I worked 270 extra hours, counting extra-long days, evening stints and weekends. I am feeling, shall we say, somewhat entitled to my current state of exhaustion.

So, I had a lovely rant semi-written about last week's inbox full of sustained hissy-fit by a parent-of-student who is incensed because offspring doesn't make the cut for their programme of choice, and has been spamming the faculty hierarchy with increasingly self-important rants accusing all and sundry, but me by name repeatedly, of inefficiency, discrimination, racism, ignorance, despicable conduct, cruelty and what have you. Plus threats of legal action. And I was more than somewhat annoyed about all that, but then yesterday happened, and suddenly it all seems trivial and petty. I suppose the university catching fire would, in fact, deliver a nice hot cup of perspective.

I always vaguely expected my Cherished Institution to be burned down by angry students, not by rampaging bush fires, but that's nature for you. Table Mountain has significant fires every couple of years, we have stuffed the fynbos cycles royally by not allowing it to burn naturally at intervals, so when it does go up, there's all this deadwood and it's a ferocious blaze. There has been ash falling even out here, a suburb away, and the whole city is full of smoke, my eyes and breathing are feeling it.

But none of the previous fires on the mountain have actually affected campus - this time there were fairly serious winds, and the fire leaped onto campus in weird pinpoint strikes, and down over the freeway. Yesterday we lost three buildings (Jagger Library, the Botany building, and a middle campus smallish residence), and saw fire damage to others. The palm tree outside Fuller Hall went up like a torch, it was horrifying. We evacuated all the students from residences because of the smoke and ongoing threat, and there were awful pictures of little trains of them trekking through various suburbs with suitcases. The university apparently found beds for everyone in various hotels, and the community in general has been rallying magnificently with donations and food and what have you, but it's still a lot.

I have been part of this university for my entire adult life: here for undergrad and two grad degrees, and then working here both part time and full time thereafter. The Jagger library, with its special collections section, was where I spent a fair amount of time writing my PhD, it had a fantasy/sf critical collection which we started when I was chairing the Tolkien Society, and the lovely librarian used to order in good fairy-tale texts for me. It's all gone: the pics were horrible, the old building with all its windows full of flame. Some of the more fragile and valuable collections were in fireproof rooms under the library and are mostly OK, but we've lost a bunch from the African Studies library. The building is across the road from my office, which feels uncomfortably close, but it also feels as though a part of my own history has gone up in flames. Yesterday was awful, increasingly disbelieving doomscrolling through all the social media pics, and the weirdest sense of unreality - as if a year of COVID wasn't bad enough, now this? some kind of cosmic joke. The library going was a gutpunch, I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon in helpless tears.

This image of the sign to upper campus, which I've screenshotted from a media compilation on Youtube, really got me:



I suppose, now, we go on doing what we've been doing throughout the COVID crisis: what we can. Assess, replace, try to make it work in spite of everything. I hope the university has really good insurance.

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.

Day 1 of shutdown. This has had a weird effect on my backbrain, I have had on three separate occasions this morning had to forcibly restrain myself from wildly buying a Nintendo Switch online. Apparently having Witcher 2 and 3 lined up to play over the shutdown is insufficient. Also, all the Animal Crossing content on Tumblr and the Breath of the Wild 2 announcement are clearly triggering me, it's all their fault, I can't be blamed. Currently I am slightly awash in tea as the best possible response is distraction, I get up and make myself another cup whenever the desire to click "place order" is overwhelming. Fortunately there are three large boxes of Earl Grey in the cupboard, the result of adding potential shutdowns to my normal tea-hoarding proclivities.

I mean, I don't even know if the stores are still delivering non-essentials right now. Although I could probably work up an impassioned defense of videogaming as essential to my mental health under the circs. But I also think this is another offshoot of the curious unreality of this apocalypse, the way the world - and thus the actual, concrete implications of madly spending R8000 I can't really justify - doesn't seem to be quite real right now.

The university is in a state of flux, we are having enormous difficulties finding a way through the academic year when something like a third of our students don't have home internet access or laptops and can't be expected to study remotely. Central management is, I fear, being more than usually tone-deaf about this. I do not enjoy the way that this kind of crisis inexorably tends to reveal that we're actually being managed by an evil corporation rather than an academic institution.

Whew! Hello, abandoned and neglected internets. So... my absence can be explained by the fact that I have been running orientation and registration simultaneously for the last two weeks, which has entailed arriving on campus before 6.30am and leaving after 5 on a daily basis, other than that one day when I ran orientation for three hours, did seven hours of curriculum advice and finished signing forms at 7pm.

I have survived the following:

• one (1) faculty admissions fubar (500 early offers of places being revoked for non-meeting of admissions threshold in final results, screwing orientation signup more than somewhat);
  
• one (1) slightly above minor orientation leader meltdown (I told them to stop doing Something Bad too forcefully and they were hurt and outraged and tried to rebuke me for it, which I resisted in spades (frequent reiteration of "this is a job") because if my own job is doing anything, it's teaching me to successfully hack off at the knees the more destructively narcissistic tendencies of Generation Z*);
  
• two hundred and fifty (250) extra students in my second orientation programme, resulting in 500+ students occupying a venue designed to seat 400, leading to droves of them decorating the stairs, floor and back wall;
  
• several (3) outbreaks of incompetence from administrative staff resulting in the non or very late arrival of key registration elements (forms, handbooks, signage, queue marshals) to the venue;
  
• seventeen (17) trips up or down my Cherished Institution's impressive selection of stairs to migrate between my office and the reg venue, in our jolly January heat;
  
• one (1) intervening weekend in which I was completely unable to do anything but lie feebly on the sofa under various cats while simultaneously hosting a varied combination of aches, lassitude and brain fuzz;
  
• innumerable (?) instances of the more destructively narcissistic tendencies of Generation Z*, largely manifesting as the touching belief that their particular query or crisis was clearly more important than either the universities rules/requirements or any of the other 5 things I should be doing simultaneously, and that I should be dropping everything to attend to them at length.

So, the problem, as it has manifested over the last six or eight years, is actually that neither millenials nor Generation Z* are, at base, fundamentally compatible in any way with large-scale institutions. Both are lovely generations in many ways - connected, protective, accepting of difference - but both demonstrate, by way of both upbringing and media conditioning, absolute commitment to the central tenet of themselves as individuals, unassailably valuable in their own right. That's lovely, really it is, and probably healthy in all sorts of ways, up until the point where 6000 of them (we have a large faculty) decide that their individuality is more important than our rules, policies, structures or timetables, and that they have a right to be individually accommodated. They are deaf and impervious to the suggestion that it is not logistically possible to administer 6000 special cases, and particularly not when I, a single person with no actual assistance in my academic oversight roles, am acting as the hapless conduit to this expectation.

I am, shall we say, very tired. In the sense of completely buggered. I have a week more of reg and then another week of change of curriculum, which is slightly less demanding but brings its own new and inventive brands of challenge, difficulty and upset. Then I shall crash, probably with an exciting new 'flu bug imported by a globetrotting student from some far-flung corner of the world. Then I shall look for a new job, hopefully in New Zealand or Scotland or Canada, or somewhere else cold. I am done.

* the one with the snowflakes.

One of those upsy-downsy days. On the downside, the faculty office continues in meltdown, with the faculty manager still off hissy-fitting and the shattered remnants of a once-functional administrative system trying desperately to reconstitute itself in her absence, severely hamstrung by the almost complete lack of institutional memory given how many people have left in disgust in the last year and a half. I have perhaps two and a half actual allies in this whole clusterfuck, to whom I have taken to delivering, of a morning, ceremonial batches of The Chocolate Brownies of Moral Support. (They're very supportive brownies, on the same principle as an empowering lemon bun).

Perhaps as a symbolic externalisation of my designated place in all this, while I was walking down from my car this morning, one of my Cherished Institution's seething population of half-evolved starlings flew deliberately up behind me and whapped me over the back of the head for no adequately defined reason, causing me to stop dead in the middle of the path and ask it "what the fuck was that for?" in tones of pained reproach, while passing students laughed at me. It seemed symptomatic of the whole.

On the upside, the Exam Tent City appears, against all odds, to have survived exam season unenflamed or otherwise disrupted, which is frankly more than anyone expected. (Lovely argument with Jo at dinner the other night about whether or not the Tent City approach can be statistically correlated with the lack of protests, which of course it can't on account of sample size, but I am a narrative rather than a numerical creature and must have plot causality. I do enjoy exposure to other thought paradigms, though, it's exercising to the faculties). Elsewhere, I have spent large chunks of the week moving lost, unhappy students out of other faculties into Humanities programmes, which is a surprisingly low-effort sort of positive validation thingy, it's fairly easy to make them puppy-dog levels of happy about escaping the wrong choice of degree. One of them this morning, after I'd lengthily assisted him to find a path through the ridiculous snarls of the music curriculum, informed me that I was a "delightful human being". That sort of thing definitely helps.

On a sort of lateral, neither up nor down side but definitely a side, this morning I informed the Deputy Dean most nearly concerned with my operations that I was looking for employment elsewhere and might be reasonably expected to resign in the next few months, after which he clutched his head and said "oh fuck no now we're completely fucked and may as well pack up and go home". This was a worrying combination of validating and guilt-trippy, but has usefully reified this actual getting the hell out thing to the point where, well, now I have to find a new job, don't I? the Faculty Exec is discussing my departure. (I have, in a Marked Manner, completely neglected to inform my actual boss, who is the aforementioned hissy-fitting faculty manager, she can stew in her own juice until someone tells her, I care not). I feel that statements of flight are a Good Thing, overall, but it's left me feeling a weird mix of relieved, terrified, and lighter.

My subject line is Franz Ferdinand, to whom I have been listening a lot because reasons, partially reasons attributable to discovering their FFS album, which is a collaboration with an American band called Sparks and is a an FF-ish, louche, lush, burlesquey sort of Threepenny-Operatic sound with indecent amounts of verve and pleasing levels of piano. Recommended.

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.

Right. *deep breath*. So. It cannot have escaped the attention of alert witterers that I have been, shall we say, less than satisfied with my career and work life of late. Even before the upheavals caused by eighteen months of student protests, campus closures and the concomitant conditions of resource-shrinkage, my job was always a compromise: I do it well, and it has elements I enjoy and find rewarding, but they're small patches within a landscape with more than its fair share of admin swamps, uphill battles and the active orientation/registration volcano into which I am annually and ritually flung. The student protests have been the earthquake which, once the aftershocks have settled, has rearranged that landscape into one where the enjoyable patches are becoming actually difficult to locate.

I need, in short, a new job. More than that, a new career. The niche I have filled is so highly specialised that nothing else like it exists within my Cherished Institution; I have no desire to exchange my current post-student-protest difficulties for the identical or worse ones at any other institution in this country, and given that it's taken me six months and various lovely friends prodding me consistently and affectionately with sticks to get my change-averse hang-ups suppressed to the point of wanting a new job at all, I'm really not up to complicating "new job" with "new country" simultaneously. So new career it is. I am, in short, planning to shake the dust of academic from my booted feet, preferably within the next six months so I don't have to endure the bloody start-of-year volcano again.

This not unnaturally raises the difficult question of what the hell I can do instead. I have been a university teacher, researcher and administrator for my entire adult life. I have a raft of actually fairly highly honed and useful skills that go beyond the standard research/writing and teaching/counselling areas (and I'm actually damned good at those) into process management, logistics, administration, organisational insight and a variety of other potentially marketable abilities and experiences. What I lack is a sense of what the hell is out there, job-wise, that would make use of them. My experience of the non-university working landscape is so minimal that I don't even know what sort of job titles or keywords to search for.

So, when in doubt, crowd-source. A lot of you who read my blog are not in academia, or have partners or contacts or experiences outside the Ivory Tower even if you are academics. Knowing me, and the kinds of things I've been doing for decades, are there any particular roles you can think of in the non-academic world that I would be suited to? Industries, skill areas, job titles, corners where you know academic training is an advantage? Something to point me in the right direction? If it helps, I've updated my LinkedIn profile with fairly detailed job descriptions that give some idea of the individual skills my work life has developed.

I would be deeply grateful for any suggestions that would help me identify a direction for a search, because right now, frankly, the compass is simply spinning gently. Along, in fact, with my head.

My subject line is, of course, from David Bowie's "Changes", because where else?

It's Spring! While this does tend to invoke my winter-fondling, Scroogelike, homicidal misanthropy, now with added sneezing, I still can't help rejoicing in the mad sprouting of my container garden (freesias!) and the way that the plane trees down the avenue are all leaping into that pale, misty, hopeful green. It's the first warm day in a while, and I've just walked down to the post office in front of the first spring outbreak of Jammie 101, i.e. scads of students whiling away free periods (or bunking lectures) by sunning themselves on the Jameson Hall steps.

I have fond memories of those steps. They were the site, in my second year of undergrad, of large tracts of my new, shiny, springlike social life, which I found with the roleplaying crowd after a first year composed entirely of being a mouselike girly swot. The roleplaying crowd used to colonise the bottom right-hand pillar thingy at the side of the steps, and sit there in a little gaggle of Gothy black which on a good day was clearly visible if you looked up the hill from Main Road. Since we were all pale Gothy types I'm amazed we didn't catch more horrendous sunburn than we actually did. Possibly Goth complexions actually repel light-waves.

The combination of spring-new and nostalgic was weirdly replicated in my lecture this morning, the first of the semester. This entailed the dubious privilege of 45 minutes on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein without benefit of slides, as someone had left the computer set up to a dual-monitor setting which produced nothing but exciting wibbly waves on the data projector screen, and I could not for the life of me find out how to reset it. (Even subsequent Googling for tech support is coming up empty. Someone's done something very weird to the set-up). Since I was talking very much about Frankenstein as myth and visual icon, this made it somewhat challenging to rewrite the lectures on the fly to encompass the complete lack of visual aids, but on the upside I can babble enthusiastically and reasonably intelligently about Gothic lit on no provocation whatsoever so it wasn't too hard. I did lament the opportunity to show pictures of Julius Malema with suggestions that he's Zuma's Frankenstein-creature, though.

One of the slides was of Goth types in costume, as a way of linking Gothic literature to something more visual and contemporary, and like Jammie steps, it made me horribly nostalgic for the above-mentioned undergrad days. If anything at all were to tempt me back into make-up (which it isn't going to), it would be the chance to do the full-on heavy-mascara exotic-eye thing, with curly bits, à la Gaiman's Death. Because make-up isn't quite the same signifier of cowed patriarchal identity if it's performance art.

I used to be a Goth, but I got better, but sometimes I still miss it. Even if - or possibly because - it's fundamentally incongruous in the context of spring.

(My subject line, incidentally, is e e cummings, because Spring has had the damned goat-footed balloon-man on my brain all day, although this isn't "{In Just]-", it's from Spring is like a perhaps hand, which is also beautiful. I love e e cummings. I acquired him at approximately the same time that I acquired Goth and a social life. That shit is hard-wired.)

God, but horrible things happen to students. I have just sat in a readmission appeals committee for six hours, giving curriculum input on all these poor kids. Apart from the usual transition shock and the need to struggle through the challenges posed by finance, housing and travel issues and the truly appalling academic grounding provided by all too many of our schools, we have today contemplated the lives of young people suffering date rape, violent rape, assault, theft of laptops and books, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, unplanned pregnancy, serious illness, hospitalisation, AIDs diagnosis, estrangement, the illness and/or death of sometimes multiple family members, bizarre legal wrangles, learning disabilities, social stigmatisation, victimisation, stalkers, and the occasional curse. I can identify what I call a "depression transcript" at a single glance - the horribly revealing slow slide from competence into lower marks, a few fails, and finally the long, telling strings of absences. A day like that, you start wondering if anyone ever succeeds at anything at all before the inevitable nastinesses get them.

I want to have several cups of tea, a good cry, and an evening of vegging out on the sofa in front of something incredibly Hollywood and fluffy. Except I can't, because they stole the TV. It'll have to be the old fallbacks, viz. Skyrim and fanfic. Anything that distracts from the feeling of complete helplessness in the face of evil.

If I meep and tremble at odd stimuli a bit in the near future, please don't hold it against me. I have too high a bloody empathy stat for this job, is all.

I sometimes stop to wonder if any of my readers could possibly be interested in the trials and travails of large-scale administration, and then I think that, if nothing else, there's always schadenfreude. Besides, it's an interesting challenge: if I can be entertaining about advisor timetables, then NOTHING is beyond me, the world is in my grasp! (insert Evil Overlordian cackle here as I rub my hands in Glee, the new unguent. Unguent is one of those words which looks as though it should be related to cows, don't you think? It always makes me think "bovine", probably by loose association with "ungulate". Which is a word I will never again be able to use without thinking of its dexterous employment in iambic pentameter by Adrianna at an SCA event. It's orientation and I'm exhausted. Can you tell? I'm free associating).

Advisor timetables are not in themselves interesting, unless you wish to contemplate the joyous dexterity with which I now use Excel counting functions to allocate sessions even-handedly. What is interesting is the outcome of distributing said timetable and waiting hopefully in the venue for the first session of the first day. Half the advisors turned up. Various frantic emails later, we have no less than four grovelling apologies for having misread the timetable. Advisors are either academics or senior grad students, and I have to say, it's not the grad students who are defaulting to basic first-year timetable nitwittery. Tom Lehrer is wafting gently through my head ... "ivory-covered professors in ivy-covered halls." Clearly the ivory tower is actively detrimental to certain basic competencies, she says primly, and with commendable restraint.

Today's magnificent item of administrivia is not advisor timetables, however. It's the faculty handbook. The faculty handbook is the essential compendium of information on majors, programmes, courses, timetables and curriculum rules. You cannot run registration without it. Registration starts on Monday. You also can't really run curriculum advice without it, except that I am given, as an advisor wrangler, to anxiously digesting as much information as I can think of into handy-dandy handouts, which I distribute to advisors as a sort of nervous reflex. This is fortunate, as we've been running orientation advice sessions for two days without the handbooks. The printers have failed to deliver, despite being scheduled to do so last week. They have promised delivery "today" on, at last count, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday of last week, and every day this week. This morning we let loose the dogs of war, namely our most fearsome deputy registrar, aimed at the throat of the MD of the printing company with pinpoint precision. The upshot? This afternoon the printers delivered sixty-two boxes which, upon examination, proved to contain not the undergrad handbook, but the postgrad. Postgrad students register in about two weeks' time, and there is absolutely no use whatsoever for the handbooks until that point. Of the undergrad handbook, not a sausage.

I'd be tearing my hair out, except I'm a sort of blank, resigned space where I simply shrug, and make contingency plans. There's something curiously relaxing about a catastrophe which is not your fault and is utterly out of your control.

(We're back to Goats for subject line surreality. Goats will print itself on the inside of your eyelids in soothing pastel tones while you sleep.)