Six weeks later.... in shiny things

....and I am making an entry at 11 pm on a weeknight, because (a) I have decided to, as they so amusingly say in Peepshow, pull a sickie tomorrow. I need a mental health day!! And (b), I got a teeny little keyboard for my iPad today, and it is so much fun to type on that I actually want to use it. I’ve been blaming my lack of writing on my iPad, which I got a year ago to replace my aging laptop. I loooove my iPad; I don’t regret getting it in the least, but I have to admit it’s been more difficult to write on. The onscreen keyboard is a pain in the ass, and although I do have a keyboard case with a nice keyboard that types very well… it’s heavy and thick and it always seems more trouble than it’s worth to take the iPad out of its normal case and put it in the keyboard case that I don’t KEEP it in because the whole point of the iPad is being teeny and light and portable… and yes it really does boil down to being too lazy to keep changing cases. (It’s a third-party case, not an Apple one, which are probably less heavy and awkward) This new keyboard without a case (a Logitech) is ridiculously light and tiny and thin, and it types REALLY nicely.

And although I used to write entries at work, back in the lovely days when I had spare time, I don’t have spare time anymore. That’s one reason I’m taking a mental health day – I am exhausted. We’re now splitting up students by the alphabet, as I wrote about in my previous entry ages ago, and .... I HATE IT!!!! I HATE HATE HATE IT!!!!!

Well, okay, it will probably be fine. This is our trial-run semester, and it really has turned out to be more complicated and involved than we were expecting, and Mr. Organized and I took more students than Aggravation Receptionist and Miss Tattoo because we are used to doing the more complex stuff and they are learning it— so we’ll be able to shift around but right now it’s about to kill both of us. We actually have deadlines for things now, like Senior Checks, where we email students a list of their remaining requirements for graduation. So we’re doing Senior Checks with the goal of getting them all done in eight weeks, whereas we just did them till we were done previously. Now we have quotas!!! Which are currently very arbitrary and self-imposed and can be adjusted since this is a trial run semester, but I’m feeling stressed out about it anyhow. Currently I’m ahead of my Senior Check Game and I’m STILL feeling stressed out, because I’m not used to having deadlines- even self-imposed ones.

And what better way to battle feeling overwhelmed and behind in my work than taking a day off??? Well, it will give me a chance to rest and relax and when I go back Thursday I am determined to be more balanced about this. Also, the weather has been absolutely stunning these past few days and I need to enjoy it before winter sets in.

What I hate, though, isn’t even the feeling of pressure from arbitrary deadlines – it’s doing newly declared majors and major changes. Which is what Aggravation Receptionist has always done in the past. Because, OMG, they are SO SO SO BORING!! They are mind-numbingly boring, and it’s the same thing OVER AND OVER AND OVER and I am not going to go into details because the details are so boring it will kill you just reading about it. They are also not difficult it all so I’m starting to understand why AR sat around playing online and texting all day. It’s just entering data into the system. Over and over and OVER and over and over. Each one is a zillion steps, too, and they are all easy and all murderously boring. And there are SO MANY. So, so SO SO many.

I really do hate it. I’ve never been good at tedious tasks- I get bored fast and quit paying attention and make mistakes- so the only good thing I can say is they aren’t hard and they don’t take long at all individually. But they never ever seem to stop appearing in my in-box. I’m hoping I won’t hate it so much when I get used to it, but I’m doubtful that it’s going to work like that. There WILL be times when we don’t have so many at once, at least. And we’ve gone paperless so it doesn’t involve making files and making copies and sending them to all the individual offices now. It’s just indexing them into the paperless system and emailing the admins. I would really lose my mind if files were still involved.

I do need to note that AR seems to be doing okay with the senior checks, at least- although Mr. Organized is still having to double check her after weeks of doing them, which is causing him a lot of extra work. And she certainly isn’t sitting at her desk doing nothing anymore, which is refreshing.

Hahaha, so now I’ve gotten THAT out of my system and I’ve ranted about work for a whole entry, maybe I’ll manage to get back to my England entries. Now that we’ve been back for.... over four months. OMG.

Last updated October 04, 2017