Let's have early happy hour and a little whine! in shiny things

I am at work, but I am done. Done done done. Done with this day, done with this week, done with last week too. It has just been GRUELING. It’s early registration, so that’s to be expected, but, OMG. And Mr. Organized was gone on vacation last week and is now gone again to a conference in New Orleans, which is just a TAD annoying. I did get to go to a conference myself not long ago, and this is the first conference he’s been to in .... ten years??? He’s our DegreeWorks Power User, as if that will mean anything to anyone not associated with a college, so he went to Seattle for training when we first got DegreeWorks, YEARS ago. There’s about to be a big upgrade, hence this conference. And unlike me and my happy solitary co-workerless journey to Philly in December, he’s with quite a few other Power Users (I keep getting images of Power Rangers every time I say that. They are not Power Rangers. They are normal office drones.) I am still jealous. However, we just did Self-Evaluations for our annual reviews (they review us to DEATH, there are about a gazillion steps for each year’s review), and I really laid my Docuware role on with a heavy hand as part of my accomplishments and goals and dreams for the future, so that I will have justification for going to the next one. Whenever/wherever that is.

Till then, I get to deal with all the madness of registration issues, advising issues, graduation issues, etc etc etc. And all the attendant lunacy.

Like.... the advisor who emailed me saying “I keep getting an out-of-office reply for {Aggravation Receptionist’s Real Name} every time I send her anything - do you know when she’ll be back?”

......ummmmmm.... like, NEVER?!?!?! Because she has been gone since October 2017!!!!! It took me quite some time to simmer down enough to compose as nice an email as I could letting the advisor know AR has in fact been gone for A YEAR AND A HALF FOR FUCK SAKE. We were all quite astonished that AR’s email is still even working; we thought emails got shut down as soon as people leave. Ooooops! To give her credit, the advisor was mortified. She was on leave last semester, she thought maybe THAT was how she missed it, but AR had been gone nearly a year when last semester started.

And there’s just all the STUFF we have to do now, since reorganizing how we operate. Most of it stuff I find boring/annoying/crazy-making. Like the change of major/minor/whatthefuckever forms. If students want to make a change, they fill out an online form. We get the form via email and split them up alphabetically. I’m N-Z! And also M when I forget that I’m not M, which is so disturbingly often that I probably shouldn’t be making fun of Oblivious Advisor.

So the forms are simple. And they ask a few things like “have you applied to graduate?” because for some incomprehensible reason, the registrar’s office has to make these program changes for students who have applied to graduate. Something to do with something on the records screen we update for changes that doesn’t automatically update to some other records screen, and we don’t have access to update the other records screen, and if it doesn’t get updated, the student’s degree info will be wrong, and yep, it’s the typical bizarro logistically nightmarish situation that happens every time the Registrar’s Office is involved in anything.

So. Approximately half the students who fill out these change forms (1) say they did not apply to graduate when in reality they DID apply to graduate (2) say they did apply to graduate and then proceed to ignore the detailed and glaringly obvious instructions for what to do if they applied to graduate, and they fill out the damned form anyhow (3) are not even our students, and have filled out the wrong college’s form (4) can’t manage to figure out which major/ minor they want to change to/from/drop/add/whatever and so submit a form that makes no sense at all. And all of these take all sorts of extra time to deal with and I am always extra annoyed because I don’t like having to process changes to begin with, and I really REALLY REALLY don’t like it when people are unable to read/comprehend/follow simple instructions.

And then there are the advisors!!! Speaking of not being able to read/comprehend/follow simple instructions. They send us class substitutions for students who couldn’t take the required class or didn’t want to take the required class or failed the required class poor little things… and we put the substitutions into DegreeWorks, which is what you look at online to see a student’s progress. Naturally advisors send us subs with the wrong class name, the wrong class number, classes that are already required in another area of the major so can’t be a sub for another class, DUH.... They also send the wrong banner number (how we find students in the system), or no banner number, and use the student’s nickname so I can’t look it up (even if I was willing which I am not). My lovely coworker Miss Tattoo used to do all the sub requests before we split all this stuff between us, and she is a hardass who won’t put up with that kind of shit. She puts stuff into DegreeWorks just like they gave it to her, and if it’s wrong they can figure it out down the road- but to me that just ends up being extra work because they are NOT going to figure it out and it’s going to be An Issue when the students apply to graduate, and it causes me even MORE work!!! And it’s not very fair to the students, when for once it wasn’t their fault. Probably.

Ha, now it’s Saturday and I never did finish this up. Untimely as it is now, I’m posting it anyhow since I so rarely make any entries at all these days. And I had lots more to whine about but that will be fodder for another day.