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Day 130: aargh
Friday, 31 July 2020 03:31 pmI am drowning in emails, I'm barely keeping up, there must be a couple of hundred a day. Probably over half of them are students asking questions which I can answer by simply saying "please see the announcement I sent out about this", which they have clearly missed or not read properly. Or, in fact, which they may be replying to in order to email me, which ... yeah. There is a certain amount of banging heads on desks, let's just say.
So I had a lovely long rant half-written about that, and then at lunchtime today had my annual performance review with the Dean, who is my line manager. And while she was nice about it and otherwise thanked me for all the extra work I have been doing to make remote faculty processes work, she felt impelled to relay a complaint she's had from a colleague (unnamed) who'd mentioned I was occasionally "abrasive" to students and staff. And did I have any comment, or solution?
So I have deleted my lovely long rant, because I feel sick, and also disinclined to grapple with my job in any detail. Because this job? is beautifully designed to make me do whatever student-facing scut work the academics don't want to do, and they overload me and under-resource me and keep trying to shuffle academics' responsibilities off onto me, because overall they are successful academics as a result of the wide streak of self-serving egotism in all of them, which you need to have in order to kick your way to the top of this antheap. And then during peak periods I break under the strain of 12-hour days and constant nagging for my attention, and develop panic attacks and insomnia and self-harming behaviours, and am "abrasive" to students when the twentieth boundary-ignoring stupid question of the day catches me at the end of my resources. They did that. They made me into that. To fucking well turn around and complain that I am "abrasive" under the strain is a fucking insult.
I'm going to play Skyrim now. I'm on strike.
So I had a lovely long rant half-written about that, and then at lunchtime today had my annual performance review with the Dean, who is my line manager. And while she was nice about it and otherwise thanked me for all the extra work I have been doing to make remote faculty processes work, she felt impelled to relay a complaint she's had from a colleague (unnamed) who'd mentioned I was occasionally "abrasive" to students and staff. And did I have any comment, or solution?
So I have deleted my lovely long rant, because I feel sick, and also disinclined to grapple with my job in any detail. Because this job? is beautifully designed to make me do whatever student-facing scut work the academics don't want to do, and they overload me and under-resource me and keep trying to shuffle academics' responsibilities off onto me, because overall they are successful academics as a result of the wide streak of self-serving egotism in all of them, which you need to have in order to kick your way to the top of this antheap. And then during peak periods I break under the strain of 12-hour days and constant nagging for my attention, and develop panic attacks and insomnia and self-harming behaviours, and am "abrasive" to students when the twentieth boundary-ignoring stupid question of the day catches me at the end of my resources. They did that. They made me into that. To fucking well turn around and complain that I am "abrasive" under the strain is a fucking insult.
I'm going to play Skyrim now. I'm on strike.
