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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.
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Fun features of Registration Hell Season: three different advisors using the wrong ID to assign student reg submissions to me on the database over a five-day period, so I didn't see them and found them only by accident, hitting me with a merry 30-strong pile to process when I thought I'd cleared my queue. Considering pinpoint retributive laser strikes from orbit.

Fun additions to Registration Hell Season: orientation. I have been working 10-12 hour days for several weeks and am very tired and scattered, so discovered only today that the orientation site, which I opened to students on Wednesday, had been released with the benefit of my extremely flawed and distracted fumbling of the degree groups. These were supposed to restrict students to seeing the curriculum material for their own programme only so they don't all sign up for the wrong degrees on the wrong forms, and I managed to screw it up so they don't see any curriculum info at all. Which, aargh. They really need that time to process it before they register. Sorted now, but aargh.

Fun additions to Registration/Orientation Hell Season: a mini exam committee in the middle of it, processing all the students who wrote deferred or summer term exams; small board schedule, only 100 or so, but I have to do it over this weekend. I am tired and scattered, see above, and checking them is like pulling teeth. I have sacrificed my last chocolate orange to the cause, and am permitting myself a segment if I check ten records.

(It's a slightly weird check, too, we assessed continuously rather than with exams last year, because remote, and it's inflated the marks so the distinctions and Dean's Merit List awards are off the charts. Remote learning and COVID have been very polarising, we have simultaneously the highest fail rate and highest distinction rate we have ever had, selecting, of course, against lower income students who don't have good work conditions or internet access. Yay transformation. And the Law faculty's merit-based access to the Law major has set its admission bar nearly 10% higher than usual because of the marks inflation, and unsuccessful students are exploding furiously all over my inbox. Sigh. It's usually fatal to cross a Law-inclined student, they all fancy themselves lawyers already, and present Arguments.)

Fun additions to Registration/Orientation/Exam Committee Hell Season: still no new glasses, and I can't bloody see with these ones, I have to slide them down to the end of my nose to read the tiny board schedule writing, and they keep falling off. Very distracting.

On the upside, the weather has remained below 30 so I don't have to make blood sacrifices to the rain gods, which is just as well, I'm too tired to leap naked around a pentagram. And my flame lily is green and leafy and flowering like a mad thing. It's not all bad.
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Orientation/registration hellseason seems to have leaped out of the gate with considerable verve and velocity this year, I have been working 11-hour days since the start of last week. I am thus currently submerged in the usual sticky and insistent morass of remote registration admin, orientation site design, continuous student queries, advisor solecisms, tech support and fervent wishes for gin. A more than usually infuriating two-punch of student unpleasantnesses yesterday caused me to have to mute my computer, step away from the keyboard and go and play Stardew Valley for an hour to simmer down. (Spend three days patiently explaining the rule behind the "no" I have to give, to increasing petulance and anger, only to have the student go over my head and negate the umpteen emails and hours of typing when the higher-ups promptly fold and grant the concession in the way I've been specifically instructed isn't possible. Twice. Honestly.)

However, there are consolations! today has been materially improved by the following.
1. An advisor sending me an Instagram capture from one of the university's general student hangouts, which cheerfully states "The devil works overtime. Jessica (plus my surname initial) works harder." Which made me go awwwwwwww. Sometimes they do notice.
2. Getting today's Wordle in three goes, possibly as a result of undue fanfic exposure. (You do all know Wordle? Simple, brilliant, addictive. It starts my morning remarkably pleasantly on a daily basis for minimal time input.
3. Cooler weather for the last few days. Thank heavens. Although tomorrow also projected to be a stinker. I do not enjoy temperatures in excess of 30 degrees.
4. The discovery, in the course of digging through the cupboards for more sugar for my tea, of the stash of Terry's chocolate oranges I bought in the post-Christmas price drop zone, and promptly forgot about.
5. The further discovery, over the last week, that feeding her Animalax on a daily basis and catnip on a twice-weekly one reduces the level of continuous whinging from Pandora to something a lot more bearable. She seems to be missing Jyn. Or complaining about the heat. Or suffering existential angst. Or resenting the quality or the food service. Or her arthritis is flaring up again. Honestly, who knows, but the above seems to help.

I am very tired and very stressed (in retrospect, working straight through the Christmas break to update the orientation site was predicably detrimental to my ability to handle all this), but life is not actually all bad.
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We have nearly finished processing the returning student registrations, which means that currently we are doing the last-minute ones concurrently with orientation and registration for the new students. This is not an auspicious year in which to begin your university career: we are teaching largely online this year, and the remote format is going to give these kids a really shaky start to university learning, and absolutely nothing of the real university experience, which is as much inadvisable friendships, inadvisable drinking and hanging out on the Jammie steps between classes as it is actual academics. Bugger COVID, anyway.

Part of my excessive hours over the last few months has been spent cobbling together a virtual version of the usual four-day orientation programme, which has been exhausting and fiddly and at times seems to offer insurmountable obstacles, like the general inability of a large subsection of the student body to read and retain information from anything longer than a tweet. I think we have a comprehensive and largely accessible body of material here; the difficulty is in getting them to actually read it. I need a virtual version of pushing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk, stat.

At any rate, the draft registration forms submitted for advisor checking over the last four days have revealed a subset of students who have clearly read, understood and taken to heart, and who offer nearly perfect forms requiring only minor tweaks; and a much larger subset of students who have clearly done none of the above. Exhibits in the second category including such gems as:
  • A long lament about being confused and unable to find the orientation site, to which confusion I can absolutely attest in that said lament is being submitted on the orientation site;
  • A little clutch of submissions on the form for the wrong programme, which is bewildering me because I have the forms very carefully set up so that students can only see or access the ones for their actual programme; I think they must be swapping them with each other, in lieu of the usual orientation week swapping, via the usual teenaged excitable groping, of exotic doses of 'flu from the four corners of the earth;
  • Several submissions which have completely ignored semesterisation, and presented me with a curriculum with seven courses in one semester and one in the other;
  • Those particularly inventively error-ridden forms which have tried to sign themselves up, variously, for English Masters-level courses, or Engineering maths, or a random practical course in tuba;
  • The deliriously indecisive young lady who submitted two forms, one for the BA degree, one for Social Science, including entirely separate and different majors and courses, and left absolutely no indication (a) why the duplicate, or (b) which one she actually wants. I am still puzzling over what she was trying to do.

I mean, I know the info is there. About half the students seem to find it OK, to a greater or lesser extent. Others... don't even try. Some of the kids are all right. Is that enough?
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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.)
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Those bloody horrible beetles are back, colonising my kettle base in droves, presumably high on contact adhesive after eating their way through the plastic barrier I'd lovingly constructed. I had to have another bash-and-horrified-yell session last night, with seething populations hyperbolically speaking in the thousands rather than millions, but still numerous enough for serious scurrying action. I am increasingly homicidal about this: I brought out the big guns last night, viz. the duct tape, and have now TAPED the plastic barrier FIRMLY to the base in an UNBROKEN LINE, through which I confidently expect the little shits will simply eat, in order to continue their dubious nesting activities in the warm, after which I shall resort to a small tactical nuke from orbit as the only way to be sure. Aargh.

Time is very weird in this crisis: the weeks are composed of pockets of glacial slowness strung together into days which whizz past very fast, probably because they are comparatively featureless. The featureless days undoubtedly owe some of their effect to my Cherished Institution's inability to resolve anything whatsoever without Yet Another Meeting, which means I've had at least one more or less interchangeable Zoom or Teams meeting daily this week. Today being notable for FOUR of the bloody things, the most recent one of which has been pleasingly enhanced by the random and erratic introduction of Jyn's ears or tail to proceedings, so clearly I have Arrived, in remote meeting terms. (No-one commented, but everyone grinned whenever she popped up on the camera feed, I feel I have contributed my bit to morale). This week has also been enlivened by a successful battery-charging episode, hooray, the nice neighbour lent me his battery charger, and I happily demonstrated to myself my continuing ability to uninstall and install a car battery without setting fire to anything, and in defiance of my complete inability to find my shifting spanner.

I have also celebrated my inadvertant money-saving by ordering a robot vaccuum cleaner, on account of my increasing inability to deal with the house's component of cat hair and tracked kitty litter, and my uneasy awareness that this is probably both my living and my working space for at least the rest of the year. Also, cute robots are consoling and will function as an extra cat for purposes of conversation and petting, both of which are keeping me sane. Taking suggestions for names.
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  • My sister texted me from a restaurant last night, where her server noticed the surname on her credit card and asked if she were related to me. Apparently I have massively assisted him in every year of his studies and he is very grateful. I am not sure if this actually compensates for the hell aspects of this helljob, but it's very nice to hear. History does not relate if he brought her free shots on the strength of the association, possibly I actually need to be in the restaurant for that to happen again.
  • The Religious Studies department brought me fancy chocolates this morning. They are trying to drum up numbers in their courses, and I enlivened advisor training this year with, according to onlookers, a heartfelt, impassioned and articulate rationale for advisors to push REL courses on students looking for electives. (This didn't actually do violence to my atheist soul as it's a comparative religion rather than theology department, and made a good case for both the core social science training they offer, and the absolutely vital need to understand religious belief and pressures in today's global political and cultural landscape, which, word. Also, their first-year course back in my undergrad days is materially implicated in the gentle death of the somewhat lukewarm evangelical Christian beliefs with which I arrived at university, so I owe them). They have nearly doubled their first year courses and are seeing marked increases in senior course sign-up, which means I've had a measurable effect even given the hideous 120% of capacity at which this year's first year is labouring. Heh.
  • My small cat, Jyn of legend, song and inoperative jump module, is going through a hyper-affectionate phase, where she will reliably run to the door to meet me when I get back home from work (Pandora merely lurks on top of the piano and waits for me to come to her), and will insist, several times an evening, on climbing onto the desk and headbutting me affectionately in the armpit until I stop petting Stardew Valley ducks and pet her instead. Someone on Teh Internets mentioned the other day that they have never known a cat with the tuck-head-under-human-chin-lovingly impulse who wasn't taken away too early from the mothercat as a kitten, and I have to say, insufficient maternal training would also probably explain the deficient jump module. She still can't climb out of an open window if she has to balance on the windowsill to get up there. I am mentally adding it to the list of reasons to ritually curse her original owners, the bastards who imported her for their visiting grand-daughter and then got rid of her when the child left.
  • In tenuously related news, I finally beat the *()%^@#& Stardew Valley fishing minigame on the Ipad, where I can't mod the hell out of its ridiculously fiddly and demanding butt. I feel that the universe is validating my imminent Ipad upgrade, which has become a necessity because my current iteration's most recent possible operating system upgrade option is too old to run either Firefox or the 1.4 Stardew Valley content update, which is lovely and adds materially to game enjoyment. Bugger Apple's careful operating shenanigans for the obvious marketing ploys they clearly are, anyway. But a tablet of some sort is vital to my reading-fanfic-in-bed routine, as well as to my game-playing needs when I have to elevate my feet because my ankles have swollen again. And I don't want to go Android because I'll have to buy all the apps again for Android. Sigh. Fortunately, I can fund the upgrade almost entirely from the money left over in my account at the end of February, which happens because I'm too bloody busy with reg over Jan and Feb to actually spend any money. On a cosmic level, I have totally earned this.
  • When I mentioned to the Deputy Dean that I'll be on leave for just over a week from tomorrow, he looked momentarily stricken and then muttered, not quite under his breath, "well, that seems overdue". A sentiment with which I can only heartily concur.
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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.
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  • My cellphone, in a particularly arcane manifestation of my techno-jinx, has been unable to connect calls for the last six months or so. Everything else works; calls ring, I can swipe to answer them, but there's no actual sound when I connect. I have been forwarding all my voice calls to the nearest landline for months, which is non-ideal but hasn't been a particular issue because I really don't get many voice calls, and most of them are spam, and it's far more satisfying to hang up on a sales call with an actual handset that you can thunk down with extreme prejudice. When I finally got around to doing something about the problem, the lovely lady in the MTN shop tested it, went "Hmmm", and gently pointed out that calls worked perfectly fine if you put them on speaker, which means that the actual phone speaker was fucked (apparently the calls-on-speaker one is separate). New phone time. As I have every intention of shaking the dust of this country from my feet one way or another in the next year, I didn't want to upgrade and lock into a two-year contract, so I madly bought myself an advance-Significant-Birthday-Present new phone, which arrived yesterday, in, according to the inscrutable workings of the techno-jinx, the middle of a thunderstorm. I have spent the morning happily switching phones, and crooning gently to myself about how cool technology is when it works. (The new phone is Large and Glossy and the Samsung switch programme is a dream to use, happy little obedient functional thing).
  • I found myself, however, weirdly and genuinely choked up when it came to shutting down the old phone for the last time. It was my first smartphone, and led me gently into smartphone ways, and was fun and small and sweet and worked for years, and I played Avengers Academy obsessively on it for months, and it was a reasonably constant companion I had just started to train myself not to leave behind, and I shall miss it. I thanked it affectonately in the approved Marie Kondo fashion, but it was still a sad parting. And, really, humans are very weird about anthropomorphising tech, increasingly so as tech becomes more active and complicated and thus easier and easier to anthropomorphise. I had a very entertaining conversation with the GPS lady driving into Woodstock to pick up the phone yesterday, we had Certain Disagreements on the route. Or maybe it's just me and I'm just weird.
  • I am, also weirdly given my usual state of hermitlike introversion, seriously looking forward to the Arts Festival trip this coming week. (The Jo's Infinitely Expanding Social Circle was employed by her to good effect in that she found me a house-sitter, who is called Landi and is lovely and who my cats like immediately. It is something of a relief.) Possibly the anticipation is more acute because the faculty is Exerting Reproach, with a strong subtext of You Should Cancel Your Leave, at my absence from Significant Meetings, the more so because the otherwise lamb-like deputy Dean has decided to fuck off on sabbatical suddenly and without warning and also won't be in the meeting. I have stuck to my guns, with increasing irritation, and have spent chunks of the last week rustling up and training replacements, and trying to talk down the faculty manager from a flat panic. I am assuaging the inevitable guilt by promising to be on WhatsApp for the significant few hours, in case they absolutely can't do without me, but really, are they toddlers? Seriously, life's too short to hold the faculty's hand for ever, and they bloody well have to get used to doing without me because I Do Not Intend To Stay Here Much Longer.
  • I enjoyed this Buzzfeed article about making yourself more desirable to men, which may seem weird given that making myself desirable to men is something I haven't been interested in for at least a decade, but becomes less weird if you actually read the article. "Instead of shaving your arms weekly, add more hair to them and become a human blanket for your boyfriend in the winter. Or remove every strand of hair from your body and scream through the night like an infant. Really embrace having baby-smooth skin." I also haven't shaved my legs in over a decade, the resulting fur is useful in our current cold snap; I occasionally shave under my arms, in a desultory and intermittent sort of fashion when it randomly occurs to me to do so, mostly because I can do it in under a minute and, weird unpleasant smooth-skinned youth/baby fetishisation aside, the thing which narks me most about male-focused expecations of female grooming is how much bloody time it expects you to devote to it. Bugger that for a game of soldiers.
  • I am living in something of a Good Omens haze, the fanfic is increasingly adorable and, in large tracts, weirdly domestic. It's almost all Aziraphale/Crowley, and a lot of it is steamy, but there's a larger than usual subset of asexual fic, which I'm enjoying because that's my personal headcanon for the angels. Also, the wingficcers are out in force. I loved this in particular. I also recommend Michael Sheen on Twitter for righteous takedowns of bigotry. And the Christian group's misguided petition is hysterical.
  • It's not at all weird that Jo&Stv are hauling me off to Overture for a birthday lunch tomorrow, because excuse for Overture, duh. I am Looking Forward To It. A lot. And the Nicest Ex-Supervisor in the World is taking me out to lunch at the Cellars on Wednesday. Ditto. I have lovely friends. But you knew that. Lots of them are you.
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  • Today I Grew As A Person. My planned Grahamstown jaunt with jo&stv is happening, it transpires, on top of our mid-year exam committee process, and I won't be able to make a key meeting. This caused me, when I realised I'd misread my own calendar, about .0003 seconds of guilt, remorse and knee-jerk trip-cancellation response, after which I strangled the impulse at birth and wrote a quick note to the Dep Dean regretting my absence. He replied with a declaration of woe and inability to continue without me, to which I sent a calm, reasoned, implacable rebuttal gently pointing out that it's ridiculous in the extreme for the faculty to rely completely on me for this sort of thing, I am neither unique nor irreplaceable, and in fact a number of senior advisors can do pretty much what I do, only slower, and with more recourse to the rulebooks. And they'll never learn to do it faster if I'm always there to do it. Which, being fundamentally a lamb and a good dep dean, he acknowledged was a sensible insight. So I don't have to do FEC, calloo callay, and can proceed to Grahamstown as planned. Heh.
  • We chose Grahamstown shows to book yesterday, by dint of comparing notes on the things we'd separately circled in the programme, and it gave me a beautiful re-enactment of Book Club Panic, that horrible sensation where I was always terrified everyone else would hate my selections and think they were terrible books. Which, in a display of Therapy Tools my ex-therapist would be proud of, I paused to acknowledge as a fear, patted kindly on the head, and thereafter ignored, succeeding by dint of considerable self-discipline to circle exactly what appealed to me without second-guessing myself in terror. And when we compared notes it was a lovely discussion and we had circled huge amounts in common, because apparently jo&stv and I, if not actually a hive mind at this point, really do spend a lot of time together in a way that is very much driven by common tastes. And now I'm all excited and really looking forward to this.
  • We also watched the first three episodes of Good Omens last night, which was a delight, Neil Gaiman did really good there. I would say it was a sign of personal growth that i kept my comments about the slashy subtext to a minimum (honestly, Aziraphale and Crowley is a delightful 6000-year romance, too OMC for words) except that I think Jo beat me to most of the good ones, so maybe the personal growth is just the result of the pre-empting of temptation by displacement. Things I particularly adored, other than the ship: the opening credit sequence, the pitch-perfect casting, the embedded in-joke references, the tightening of the novel's slightly sprawley plot. The whole thing made me really happy.
  • I can now report that I have been Officially Turned Down for my first job application for a New Zealand post, which is a sign of personal growth (or possibly the apocalypse) in that I applied at all. It's certainly further than I got with the career-change process. Apparently continuing in academia in a different country is fundamentally less terrifying to me on some level than trying to change careers in this one. Who knew. Now that the ice is broken I think it'll be easier to apply for others. Watch this space.
  • I finally grew a spine enough to tackle my music collection, which has been an utter disaster for nearly two years owing to the fact that the ham-fisted technoprimates who installed my last new hard drive stuffed up copying over the files, so half the music files were empty. Since the vast bulk of it was ripped from CD, re-creating it was going to be a massive undertaking. Fortunately I discovered last week that I had apparently, at some stage, copied the majority of the collection onto my work hard drive, where it languished unlistened to since my current office confirmation means music is unduly audible to my co-workers. In the last week I have acquired two large flash drives, copied, rationalised, converted about half of it to MP3s, and backed it up in two separate places. Currently updating my car MP3 player to play something other than the same 10 artists I have cycled obsessively through for years. Definite personal growth.

another five things

Tuesday, 23 April 2019 10:57 am
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  • I spent five days over last weekend pretty much flattened with a sinus thing, which manifested as killer headache + killer nausea, necessitating three of those days spent pretty much lying flat and wishing gently for death. It's a beautiful catch-22 - I wake up with the headache, which I can't medicate without eating something first, and I'm feeling too sick to eat. The anti-nausea meds take a while to kick in, and then kick me in the head so I sleep like the dead for about five hours, but I'm pretty good at wedging a quick slice of toast and two anti-inflammatories into the tiny window before I pass out, and when I wake up the headache has at least receded somewhat. But it wasn't a happy five days. 0/10, would not recommend.
  • Origin, that evil organ of the EA evil empire, celebrated my return to health yesterday by losing my entire games library, which is annoying as I'd been distracting myself during the illness bits in which I could actually remain upright by re-playing Inquisition. All of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, gone, as if they never existed. Then Origin had a hissy fit, booted me out the login, and refused to let me log in again. The usual tech-support Google search revealed numerous other people who've experienced the same thing and received only mockery and condemnation at the hands of the EA helplines. I am horribly struck by the ephemeral, conditional and precarious nature of the "things" we "buy" when such things are virtual constructs and we are simply licensed to access them at the whim of giant, profit-obsessed corporations. I hope a complete Origin re-install this evening sorts it out; if not, I may be forced to rush howling at EA's giant, oblivious ankles with an axe.
  • While sick, I re-read Katherine Addison's Goblin Emperor three times in six days, it seems to be pressing very specific buttons which require ritual re-immersion. On mature reflection, I think that this is because it's an intrinsically and topically anti-Trumpian narrative. The Current Disaster in the US presents the scenario of an old, complex, sophisticated structure designed to provide checks and balances on the presidential figurehead's running of the country, which has been subverted with pinpoint precision by inserting a venal, amoral toddler into the figurehead position, allowing him to co-opt, bypass and pervert the system. Goblin Emperor is an exploration, in utopian mode, of an old, complex, sophisticated structure designed to allow the figurehead (the Emperor) to run the country for the benefit of its nobles, which is joyously subverted, with pinpoint precision, by inserting an outsider, someone who has survived an abusive childhood while remaining an actual cinnamon roll, into the figurehead position, allowing him to co-opt the system into serving basic decency rather than privilege and control. I cannot sufficiently stress how satisfying it is; the more so because the novel does a more than decent job of exploring race issues through a fantasy lens. Also, for the record, Goblin Emperor fanfic appears to attract high-level writers, ability-wise, and is lovely.
  • I made Irish stew for jo&stv last night, because someone mentioned it in a fanfic and I suddenly had a jones. I used this recipe, mostly; the Guinness gives it a rich, dark gravy with a slightly silken texture, it's marvellous. The Jamie Oliver version does this weird thing with greaseproof paper, damped and scrunched on top of the stew for the first hour of cooking, which I've never come across before; presumably it's to keep moisture in, but it seems oddly specific. Why scrunching? why moist? It a mystery.
  • I hope everyone had a lovely Easter weekend! I really needed the four days off, I am still glandular and headachy after the sinus thing. My faculty also, in a hitherto unknown display of staff-centredness, closed us down at midday on Thursday, giving everyone an extra, informal half-day off. It transpires that the undergrad admin office has always done this, but no-one has ever told me about the tradition, with the net result that my unit has spent the last decade obliviously working the full pre-Easter Thursday. I am somewhat miffed about this. Fortunately my line management has just moved over to the Dean rather than the faculty manager, and the Dean's secretary is somewhat mama-bearish about staff privileges, so she carefully informed me and we all buggered off home early, rejoicing. The next three weeks are also four-day weeks, owing to voting day and Mayday public holidays, so hopefully I shall continue to gently recover. Maybe.
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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.

duck and cover

Friday, 11 January 2019 10:44 am
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This is one of my least favourite times of year: it's the deep breath before all the crazy hits. Orientation is the week after next, a week earlier than usual owing to semester scheduling shenanigans from the Powers That Be, and I am frantically finalising orientation and registration material and logistics while simultaneously fending off almost continuous emails and phone calls from panicky students and, worse, their parents, who absolutely have to see me, only me, in advance of registration to assuage their panic. (Spoiler: they almost universally don't actually have to see me. I have a no-you-don't cut and paste paragraph for emails which I am employing vindictively and with extreme prejudice.)

I hate this time because of the continuous, niggling, inescapable sensation that there's stuff I haven't done yet which is urgent and vital and it'll All Fall Down if I don't. If I operate true to form I'll almost certainly line up all the necessary ducks with military precision in time for Big Giant Events to run smoothly, but the fact that said waterfowl are not yet all locked down assaults me on the astral plane. I am not sleeping well, and having my characteristic recurring dreams about missing vital objects which are leading me to bumble somnambulistically around my bedroom at night, fumbling blindly with cats and cupboards and bedside tables trying to find them. Since they have been, in order over the last three nights, a massively valuable emerald ring, the heavily barded horse for that jousting tourney, and the documents required for my departure into space, there is no actual way I will ever find them, so I seem doomed to sleepwalk fruitlessly until further notice. Or, at least, until the Big Giant Event actually begins, at which point my stress levels, weirdly, go sharply down, as if I haven't done it there's no real point in worrying about it.

On the upside, the undergrad admin office appears to have reconstituted itself as an engaged and functional entity in most particulars, so I hope this will be a Better Year than last year. Oh god it has to be.
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Oo, er. The Strange Case of Starship Iris is an extremely good sf podcast to which I have not been listening, but the transcripts of which I have been devouring illegally at work. It's funny and acute and political, something like a more enlightened Firefly with aliens and actual diversity. Recommended. I will probably listen to the actual podcast this weekend, while madly sewing new curtains because Jyn ate mine. (She tries to climb through the light cotton privacy half-curtains I have on the front window, they're in shreds). Podcasts or radio shows while sewing are a Good Thing, TM. Last sewing binge it was Cabin Pressure. Also recommended.

I am illegally devouring podcast transcripts at work because work is very quiet: exams are over, and the last-minute rush of students frantically signing up late for summer term courses has died down. As it bloody should, summer term has been running for four days already. I am very tired, as is traditional for this time of year, and managing to do orientation prep only in a desultory, intermittent and procrastinatory sort of fashion.

Exam committee season, the annual trigger of my annual rant about the flawed and time-consuming stupidities of manual board schedule checking, hits next week. The committees have all been scheduled and members hunted down by me personally, which has seen an above-average incidence of academics reeling, writhing and fainting in coils in an effort to dodge the duty, but I have been inexorable and implacable. It is a continual amazement to me the degree of passive-aggressive chill I am capable of infusing into a two-word email salutation of "Dear colleagues" when it's the fourth re-send and they still aren't answering. It's all in the punctuation.

All I need to do now is survive checking three board schedules in a row, which is one worse than the two I did last year, and shows an inexorable creep in my workload from the one which has hitherto been standard, but at least it's contenting my obsessive-compulsive need for quality control. That's three committees I know will be done properly, two of them because I chair them, and the third because I can browbeat the chair into consistency.

And then I shall go on leave for three weeks. Heh. A student informed me yesterday that I was seen as "the mother of the faculty". Five thousand teenagers to raise is a bit much, is all I can say. I need my vacation. (My subject line is Bowie's "Starman", because descriptive, and let the children lose it, and also I rather wish an alien spaceship would arrive and take me away from all this).
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Last night I dreamed another alien apocalypse, one where undefined aliens had arrived and killed/destroyed/otherwise spirited away the vast majority of people, leaving the cities mostly deserted. Those few of us who were left were surviving by dint of keeping very quiet and pretending we didn't exist, which entailed never switching on any lights, and never going outside in the open - I was holed up in the Evil Landlord's house with a couple of other vague, undefined people, trying to plot a way to get a whole group of us out of the city and up into the mountains. I never saw an alien, they were floating around in the middle distance somewhere, being cryptic and other and possibly robotic, and occasionally making me dive under the bed to hide while they buzzed the courtyard or, for some reason, teleported a live Friesian cow into the bedroom.

On the upside, yay remembering dreams, even given my currently extremely weird sleep patterns. (Only woke up at 5.15 this morning instead of 4.30, bonus). On the probably downside, or maybe slightly side side, that's an odd and revealing constellation of images. Empty cities, vanished people - an introvert's wish fulfilment (and possibly also a pipe dream for anyone who has to navigate Cape Town's current rush hour traffic ungodliness), but also rife with the calm, inevitable isolation and disconnectedness I feel when depressed.

More than that, though, a dream about the absence of people coupled with a distant, unconquerable, arbitrary threat, is a nice distillation of current geo-political wossnames: scrabbling for kinship and support with a lone few while distant, inhuman forces exert terrible power in callous, random ways. That's late capitalism right there, that is. Undue consumption of political reality via the internet could definitely leave you feeling like there are only a handful of people like you out there, ducking away from the powers that be and powerless to stop them.

On the more personal level, it's also an image of keeping your head down, surviving rather than exerting actual agency in your life. The dream never quite allowed me to gather my band of like-minded survivors and leave, after all. I could just about prevent damage by hiding under the bed. Which also neatly encapsulates my work life. I have undertaken another round of orientation/registration out of a possibly misguided loyalty to colleagues whose life will otherwise be hideous if I left, and the work environment is a lot improved in the absence of the late unlamented Demon Boss, but it's still not a bundle of joy. But I'm quietly getting on with it, and so far have avoided further damage. As long as you don't attract the aliens' attention, apparently you're fine.
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I woke up randomly at 5.30am this morning, which is fairly standard at the moment, probably because my body actually hates me and refuses to take more than 7 hours of sleep regardless of what time I go to bed, whether or not I set an alarm or how tired I am (newsflash: very, more or less perpetually). What was cruel and unusual was lying awake for ten minutes happily plotting out my Saturday and luxuriating in the feeling of not having to fight traffic to work, which lasted only too briefly before I suddenly remembered it was actually Friday and a work day. Not cricket, brain. I do not appreciate being hoodwinked and conceptually ambushed by my own cerebellum before my first cup of tea.

I am now sitting in my office having a mental wrestle with myself about whether or not I'm going to attend a faculty curriculum symposium in twenty minutes, which will subject me to (a) crowds, (b) political rhetoric, and (c) interpersonal tension, all of which give me hives. I am very, very close to mentally categorising it as "not my problem, I'm not an academic", giving this whole profoundly flawed academic edifice the finger, and buggering off home. Which would be bad, and wicked, and awful, and lovely.

On the upside, tonight I take my sister out for a birthday dinner at the local Italian joint, which is very nice, so I suppose there's that. On the further upside, for the last few days I have been re-reading the entire Drarry fanfic archive of blamebrampton, which is unduly British and frequently hysterically funny Potterslash written by someone I darkly suspect is personally located somewhere in the bowels of the British civil service, and to which I attribute any preponderance of British idiom in the above.

ding dong

Sunday, 9 September 2018 07:31 am
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I should probably have mentioned that one of the things that happened over the latest bloggery hiatus is that my evil hell-boss resigned. When the Dean came into my office a few months back to tell me about the resignation, I was completely unable to restrain myself from an small, involuntary, dignified Dance of Joy. The Dean, who is a Nice Man who shares my opinion of the Evil Hell-boss, immediately burst out laughing. "You know," he said, "absolutely everyone I've told about this has done exactly the same thing."

I occasionally reel slightly, if I can pause in the fog of resentment and anger, to wonder at quite the magnitude of the fuck-up she achieved during, what, five years in office? She attempted a grandiose and misguided office restructure which achieved nothing it was supposed to because she was blissfully out of touch with the realities of day-to-day admin, and which resulted in a massive downturn in effectiveness and productivity. In the process she rode rough-shod over the staff to an extent which caused an approximately 80% staff turnover in two years. She has spent the rest of her time diligently producing administrative process manuals which no-one will ever read, and which attempt to enshrine an office practice she doesn't fully understand. When the whole thing fell apart and the staff began to actually refuse to implement any of her instructions, she had a beautiful toddler tantrum and removed herself from office (on full pay) to sulk down the hill in another department doing unspecified "special projects", while her deputy had to do two jobs simultaneously, including manage disaffected staff. She also managed to finesse this dereliction of duty to re-characterise it as All Our Fault, not hers.

As she tactfully took her last couple of weeks of work in the faculty office as leave, this means she's left already. It is actually quite odd to contemplate how little a difference this has made. The damage has been done so extensively and comprehensively that I think we're all staggering around, stunned, in the ruins, and the fact that Great Cthulhu has fucked off back to R'lyeh doesn't really mitigate the mental trauma any. Those sanity points are lost, buster. No returns.

I find it funny, though, that she came into my office to give me a breezy, cordial goodbye on her last day in office. Lots of chatting about her new post (still within my Cherished Institution, alas) and possible co-operation down the line. I am unable to decide whether or not this is the result of me acing my personal strategy for dealing with her over the last few years, which is to be Resolutely Professional And Pleasant and not to go against anything she wanted in any upfront way, so that she genuinely imagines I'm a supporter, or if she has an equal and opposite strategy of cordiality which means the whole interchange put the Genuine levels in the room at 0.00%. It's interesting, though, to realise that several decades of role-playing have some practical upshot, I hadn't thought I was capable of that kind of sustained deception.

I still want to leave this job, although I don't have it in me to do so immediately, I'm one of the few points of institutional memory left. Apart from my sense of traumatised camaraderie with fellow administrators, I shudder to contemplate the additional, hideous reduction in service our students would experience as my replacement learned the ropes. But I am not, so to speak, committed to the enterprise any longer. The burned child eventually learns to fear the fire, at least at the point where her fingers are scorched to stumps approximately at the elbows.
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It's been very illuminating, the last year or so. I slip far too easily into the self-loathing mindset where my current spectacularly unsuccessful career existence is the result of my multiple past failures, most notably not ever managing to land an academic post back when I was still vaguely competitive for same. But actually, it would not have been a magic bullet, if by some freak of circumstance I'd finangled my way past entrenched misogyny, redress hiring and the fetishisation of Africanised content to have become an English department lecturer. If I'd done that, I would actually, at my best guess, in 2018 be at least as unhappy as I am in my present existence, in that the department concerned is currently a heaving snake-pit of vile personality politics that has chewed up and spat out several HoDs in a row over the last five years. It's not only the kind of tense, backbiting environment which most bludgeons and drains me, it's also entirely likely that if I'd been a lecturer in 2008, one of the mowed-down HoDs would have been me. There are no magic bullets.

On the other hand, that department does contain at least one colleague who has been long-term friend and ally since we were both in Masters, and whose consolatory email upon learning that Minerva do not, at present, think I am a good fit for their operation, included the above lovely sentence of my subject line. My life right now feels very much like marking time, and it is, indeed, exhausting.The job hunt continues, with reeling, writhing and fainting in coils. 

My difficult boss has, with consummate skill in the navigation of university procedures and politics, managed to absent herself from her job for four months at the most pressurised time of year and arrange a return this week under circumstances which, by a spectacular feat of gaslighting, insist that the whole thing was All Our Fault, not hers. There are doomful HR warnings hanging, not over her, but over the rest of the faculty. I'm staggering slightly, partially with reluctant admiration at the sheer chutzpah, and am also a bit numb. I think it's going to get very bad from here on out, but i can't imagine how it's going to play out, the whole situation is so bizarre, so the future feels curiously blank. At this point a quick alien abduction (of me, rather than her) would probably sort the whole thing nicely, in the sense of resolving all ambiguities, at least. I am possibly to be found hereafter of a night standing in the back courtyard looking hopefully at the sky while brandishing a small placard reading "TAKE ME NOW". An interstellar career change would be just the ticket. If not, I hear Canada's nice.

I ATEN'T DEAD

Wednesday, 21 February 2018 09:46 am
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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. 
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Orientation started this morning. I worked 12-hour days all last week, and straight through both of the last two weekends. I am ... very tired. And very, very, very reluctant to do this again, I dragged myself out of bed at 5.30 this morning with the approximate affect of a sloth in treacle. The faculty administrative melt-down is reaching new depths of horrible, with staff on minimal effort strikes all over. It's surprisingly impossible to make large-scale academic admin work when only a tiny fraction of the staff are in any way committed to the success of the enterprise; it means that, when most staff members run across obstacles, which happens often, they simply shrug and give up. They also don't tell anyone they haven't done what they should. Since error and failure are rife, students are unhappy, and guess who's sitting on the front line of all the student complaints? Muggins, is who. Muggins, a treacle-coated sloth on too little rest, is over this.

Large-scale administrative breakdown also operated in microcosm last week, when Octotel, rot them, "installed" and "activated" my "fibre" line. By which I mean they logged the fibre lines in my area as "active", causing my service provider, aka the lovely geeks at Imaginet, to schedule an installation. The Octotel technicians arrived four hours early on Monday, when I was still at work; my nice cleaning lady let them in, and they drilled holes (to their credit, very neatly and without destroying any electrical or water lines) and put two little blinken-boxes on my study wall. When I got back home, both the ADSL and the phone line were dead. I thought, oh, well, fibre is clearly incompatible, set up the new router, and spent an hour on the phone to Imaginet, crawling around under my desk at intervals, to discover that we could not persuade the fibre line to connect. This, it transpires, is because whatever Octotel's clearly mendacious indicators say, the fibre lines are installed but not actually active in my area: scheduled activation, mid-February. By which I am assuming, on current evidence, that they mean July.

So we logged a call to Telkom about the dead phone/ADSL lines, because internet withdrawal on top of orientation/registration stress is an ugly, ugly thing. Around Wednesday evening, however, I came home early enough to have enough energy to do a proper check, and tried the basic first step of plugging the dead phone into the phone jack with a different cable from the 5m one which goes around the piano from the phone jack to reach my desk. You can see where this is going, right? Happy dialling tone. (Or, at least, the weird intermittent dialling tone which I seem to get here).

Those idiot technicians had moved the piano so they could drill next to it; they'd pulled the phone extension cable off its little hooks and onto the floor, pulled the piano over it (by the evidence, moving it back and forwards several times) and, since it's a bloody heavy oak thing which takes 6 people to lift, thereby destroyed the plastic casing on the phone extension and severed two out of its three wires. I am, to say the least, severely unamused. Ham-fisted dingbats. Really. But fortunately I have a back-up 5m phone cable for reasons lost to history, and having re-cannibalised all the cabling I just cannibalised to set up the fibre modem, I am once more ADSL-connected and can soothe my soul with half an hour of dodgy Teen Wolf pr0n before bed, which is very good for the mental health.

But I am not enjoying orientation. I am tired, and wish to be elsewhere at this time. My subject line is the fragile tragic vampire girl from Angela Carter's Gothic fairy tales, because I feel fragile and tragic and Gothic.

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