Exchanging emails with one of my orientation leaders for next year: his mail programme is rather entertainingly mangling my original message when it quotes it, ending up with beautifully nonsensical strings. This morning's read "2010 wounehowesour third -howile youyouhavelare good and havere trainedplanneOLyournehowesif I shoOLThabshowk you tyouhavelown", which I promise was reasonably coherent English when I sent it. The extent to which this is amusing me is probably indicative of how stressful this week has been. Seven or eight excluded students per day. There's a high-water-mark of trauma at about chest height in my office, and my Japanese Peace Lily is drooping. Sigh.

On the upside, the chocolate biscuit supply is holding out, and tomorrow is a public holiday, which I have resolved to spend watching movies, making nucato with wolverine_nun and finishing up the Season 2 finale of Supernatural. The one with the djinn last night was slightly heartbreaking. Angsty boys! boys with angst! I keep threatening to make that correspondence chart matching Supernatural episodes with the ones they've ripped off from X-Files, in this case "Amor Fati" from Season 6. There are apparently no new plots in the world.

My adorable Hobbit is apparently an adorable psycho killer, he brought in a loudly-meeping baby bird yesterday and refused to give it up, responding to all attempts with a deeply worrying Harley Davidson growl from his manly ex-tomcat chest. Fortunately he killed it fairly quickly. The high winds over the weekend have apparently brought baby birds down from nests all over, there was another one on campus yesterday, which the university's feral cat population have presumably dealt with posthaste. There's bloody well nothing you can do for baby birds: can't put them back, can't rescue them without traumatising them beyond recovery, they're pretty much doomed to die, which, as Pterry notes, "is the function kind old Mother Nature usually reserves for small lost baby birds." Again with the sigh. I think I'll have a chocolate biscuit now.

Gah. The wages of being terminally conscientious is to spend five hours on a Saturday morning in a student-record-checking meeting which, while productive, essential, illuminating and guaranteed to reduce unnecessary student angst by a small but significant amount, was solely and directly the result of your own concerned suggestion and would in the absence of such have been replaced by a distributed check failing to supply parity and oversight but taking place, importantly, during working hours.

Also, we substantially underestimated the time it would take, so that was five hours without food and only minimal tea supplies. By the last half hour I was actually hallucinating slightly: I'm damned sure the weird monkey-man on the etching immediately opposite me in the committee room turned to look at me at least once.

In other news, these crack me up. I put it down to exhaustion.

Now I shall play Zelda all afternoon, since that's where my brain's at. I'm playing Occarina of Time, which is cute, but at which I significantly suck. The bit inside the giant fish where the flailing tentacle lashes at you from the ceiling has so far killed me five times. On the upside, I get to practise my swearing.

A Dear Little Student has just had an epistolary hissy-fit because my Cherished Institution, working at its usual mills-of-god speed, has not yet made available online the result of her entrance test. This is, may I point out, an extremely minor and not entirely instrumental data point in the admissions process: nonetheless, she has informed us that, narked by its non-appearance, she has taken the issue to President Jacob Zuma. The just-post-adolescent state of the undergrad does tend to exhibit a less than tenuous sense of proportion under certain conditions, but this example takes wild, hyperbolic threat to new heights. Normally they content themselves with a scattershot tale of woe to the Dean, the Registrar and the Vice Chancellor. I trust Jacob Zuma, after his first confusion, at least got a good laugh out of it.

I've spent a few hours this week reading the occasionally vitriolic rants at Rate Your Students, and thanking the pedagogical gods that this country's student population fails, on the whole, to aspire to quite that level of blinkered entitlement. Threats to the extreme demonstrated by today's example are on the whole mercifully rare in the annals of our institution. I don't know if young Madam is actually acquainted with Jacob Zuma or if she's merely blowing off steam, but I do wonder if students would try this sort of stunt if they stopped for a moment to consider their actual effect: the whole admin office has been laughing about it all day, it's quite made our week. Dear gazelles, at least they're occasionally good for entertainment.

I had all sorts of plans for this week: I owe dinner to herne_kzn and first_fallen and librsa, and have dismally failed to do anything about it owing to a week infested with board schedules and the concocting of plaintive letters in French to utilities companies who persist in charging my dad for power and phone services he cancelled in April. I'll get there eventually, promise.

Good lord. In a completely unexpected development, my publishers just sent me a royalty statement. They've sold 196 copies of my book. I was vaguely expecting no money at all, forgetting completely that they'd bypassed the hardback entirely (I would have seen no royalties for the first 500 copies) and gone straight to paperback, where I get 6% of net for all copies sold. This means they owe me slightly in excess of US$250. I'm... a bit weirded out, actually. The one thing I never expected from this academic writing gig was to make any money.

In other news, it's end-of-year, which means board schedule checking, ritual hiss spit. Normally I get to spend my weekend going through a 1.5cm-thick wodge of printouts to lovingly count each student's course totals, manually, and code them accordingly. However, last week it was revealed that this year's schedule requires the board schedules to be checked by Thursday's meeting when they're only produced on Tuesday, leaving us one day for checking. Having, in an unguarded moment, had a small but perfectly formed hissy fit at this discovery, I have won the right to stay at home today. This is mostly because results came out on Monday and there's no way in hell I'll get through all that checking what with the continual string of wounded, devastated students whose lives have ended because they've failed something. Therefore, board schedule checking with mitigating factors of own home, own snacks, comforting feline presence, ability to oversee the new gardener on his first day. On the downside, am not going to be on Teh Internets all day. Sigh. Don't break it while I'm out.

Oh, happy day! the billboard poet is at work again. Most notably:

ALL BLACKS ARE AMAZING!
and
TIGER'S WIFE HAS KITTENS!

In defiance of the evidence both of these are probably about sport, rather than, respectively, affirmative racial politics and Zooborns. But they made me giggle despite the fact that I woke up at 5.30am angsting about the training sessions I'm giving today, and was at work by 6.45 in a state of smouldering resentment.

In other news, Ursula Vernon finally does the gold-leaf Klimt thing to owls, with predictable results, i.e. it's marvellous:

.

Want.

This week I have faced the following potential melt-downs, not including my own elevated angst levels:

1. A student who will not accept the transfer credits I've awarded her; after a FOURTH round of arguments with me, she's taken it to the Dean. (Who will refer it straight back to me for comment, but that's another couple of hours of double-checking and justification).
   
2. A company sponsoring a student who has had several discussions with me about the student's curriculum and best interests, and then used a broad misinterpretation of the info I gave them to turn around and slap the poor sod with disciplinary action for misinformation.
   
3. An annoyed parent-of-student once more on my case threatening to get angry on me because the admin process I warned him would grind out the answer he needs sometime in early December, still hasn't ground it out. (Yes, it's still November).
   
4. The need to order exactly the right distribution of T-shirt sizes for my orientation leaders, now, immediately, despite the fact that I can only select the actual OLs in December when results are out. Apparently I'm supposed to count up all the sizes and then proportionally reduce the order to get to the correct number. I shudder to think of the chaos this is going to cause. OLs get extremely plaintive if you put them into the wrong-sized T-shirt.
   
5. Ongoing and completely unnecessary venue conflicts created by an administrator in another faculty getting the wrong end of the stick, repeatedly and hard, after not actually reading any of my emails properly.
   
6. Three students in crisis and tears because the Summer Term has at the last minute cancelled the courses they need to do to graduate. One of these is partially my fault, I missed a point when counting her courses early in the term, and she withdrew from a course she actually needed. Other than feeling futile remorse there is not a bloody thing I can do about this.
   

Under these circumstances the only possible response is to contemplate the lot of those more unhappy than I am, namely Not Always Right. This made me laugh until I choked. Tech support humour ftw.

Today's two most recent google search terms in my browser: "college impact theory" and "103 Ways to Annoy Lord Voldemort". This tells you absolutely everything you need to know about my working life. On the upside, this Harry Potter paper is taking vague conceptual shape. I darkly suspect we may actually be dealing with institutional climate theory.

In other news, if one more student panics his/her way through that door and turns out not to be clutching the relevant paperwork, I may find myself perpetrating spontaneous avada kedavra tests in a working environment.

Phooey, had a whole post written and LJ inexplicably ate it. I now have a mental image of my poor little paragraphs wandering, lost and aimless, through the wastes of cyberspace, slowly disintegrating. On mature reflection this is not unlike the basic human urge, which I do not share, to believe in some kind of survival of consciousness after death, except that there's probably more actual reason to believe in an after-image of data than there is to believe in an after-image of consciousness.

This random and unprompted cosmic musing brought to you courtesy of a week packed with disintegrating students, some of whom present no really compelling argument for the persistence of consciousness before death, let alone after. On the upside, one of them dropped by my office for absolutely no reason other than to tell me how much she enjoyed my fanfic lectures in the first term. This kind of thing creates an identical effect to that of a chance acquaintance suddenly presenting you with a giant bouquet of flowers on general principles. Also, fanficcers get everywhere, like Hobbit fur.

I don't remember most of the lost post, like the Last Post but less musical. I do remember, however, linking to Gizmodo's rather entertaining analysis of the historical development of incompatible electrical plug formats across different countries. This has produced my current Favourite Sentence Du Jour: "Basically, the best way to guess who's got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature." At last, a use for postcolonial literature. Who knew? (This last statement brought to you courtesy of Academic Bitterness, and not to be taken out of context. Some of my best friends are postcolonial literature).

Now off to fight my current, Fridayish urge to lock my door and pretend I don't exist for the rest of the day. The current degree of student trauma is creating a sad tendency for me to get all empathetically weepy while giving curriculum advice. I think I need a debrief.

Good lord, this job has its weird moments. I've just spent 45 minutes digging through a university handbook from 1970, trying to work out whether the Anatomy class taken by Fine Arts diploma students in 1970 is the Med school one, or their own art-based version. The 1970 handbook is... quaint. And somehow far more Oxbridge than the current snappy, market-oriented one. Also, layout not so much. As an encore, I shall now go to a meeting in order to squabble about venues for orientation, since there aren't actually enough large ones to go round. Expanding the university with ever-larger hordes of students is all very well, but the infrastructure is straining at the seams.

By way of distraction from the oddities of university admin, I stumbled today across the delirious and unlikely existence of the planet Nibiru and its apocalyptic intentions for the Earth in December 2012 when it disengages its apparently extremely efficient cloaking devices as it bumbles portentously through our skies. I have every intention of going to see Roland Emmerich's 2012 as soon as it opens, secure in the knowledge that it will be an entirely loud, dreadful, pointless, anti-scientific and badly-scripted collection of nonsense which will nonetheless make me extremely happy with images of large-scale cataclysm. It is a revelation to me, however, as well as a solid dose of fuel for my beliefs about the fundamental stupidity of the human race, that there are apparently vast seething masses of people out there who actually believe this shit. It's not only their touching faith in the infallibility of the ancient Mayan calendar that floors me, it's their unmatched ability to create conspiracy theories about cover-ups as an antidote to all this inconvenient science debunking the myths. Oh, and their worrying tendency to accept viral marketing campaigns for clearly stupidly OTT Hollywood blockbusters as the gospel truth.

The paranoid delusion is at such levels that NASA has a FAQ page about Nibiru and 2010. The Bad Astronomy page is also interesting for its pithy deconstruction of kooky spiritualists and pervy alien-fanciers. Charm these voices of reason never so patiently and rationally, however, that particular deaf adder has its tail in its ears and its head buried under a significantly-carved Sumerian rock, and is moreover shouting "LA LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOU!" at the top of its voice. I think I like disaster movies so much because the general apocalyptic devastation seems to me to be no more than we deserve.

The mad social whirl continues unabated. Fed raclette to jo&stv and d_hofryn on Sunday night, mmmm, cheese. Fed lasagne to waynne&jean last night, on the grounds that renovatory sods have dug up the entire floor of their house (except the bedroom) and they can't cook, sit, shower, or eat or breathe without excessive intrusion by dust. (I am all braced for our own renovations, starting in a week or two following the unexpectedly efficient approving of the plans by Council, go figure. Also go dragonroost, Man with Plan). Tonight, game. Tomorrow night, ballet. Friday night, the grad ceremony for all my orientation leaders. Weekend, collapse in the horizontal position and sleep for more hours than the weekend actually contains. Not a social butterfly, me. Require recharge time. Like a dodgy battery. Particularly since I'm once again feeling as though someone socked me in the throat several times before wantonly unplugging me from the wall socket and sticking me into the Duracell bunny to run pink fluffy marathons, or whatever. Body, she is scratched.

It's not helping that my Favourite Masters Student, TM, dropped by my office this morning in order to enthuse about all the fascinating reading she's doing, the which I have no time to do. Phooey. The problem with the glory days of postgrad lounging, free of 9-5 commitments and defined by drifting in a becomingly dilettante fashion between the computer screen, the tea supplies and the pile of new sf and toothsome, weighty critical tomes, is that one doesn't bloody appreciate them when they're happening. Mostly, of course, because one is too busy whinging about the total shortage of money, but hey, money isn't everything. By Freudian slippage I originally wrote "money isn't anything". Word.

Waaah! I wanna be a grad student again. Or, at the very least, an academic. I'm losing the lingo, because administration and student advice do not, alas, allow one to exercise the muscles of nuanced, insightful sophistication of thought - not even over the weekends, because I'm too bloody tired. If I stick around much longer I'm going to become an administrator, and heaven forfend.