I know all the "good" blogs seem to be upbeat and cheerful all the time, and I'd just love to be that way, but today I'm having a sucky Friday and I'm not too darned cheerful about it. Rats.
It started off pretty good: I got caught up on reading a couple of papers for students who need feedback before handing them off to their research advisers, then I got to the office early enough to check off my to-do list and still get home by quitting time. Or so I thought.
The first item on the list was finishing up the summer edition of the department's newsletter so I can get it off to press. I had sent the department head a draft of the issue so he could see what I had in it, check a story that I wasn't sure about because the notes his secretary had sent me had been cryptic, and send me his "column." That hadn't arrived yet, but I still needed to convert the color pictures to black and white and run the spell-checker, so I was still clicking along pretty well.
Shortly after I got the pictures cleaned up, a student worker dropped off my daily mail. No column from the department head (he's out of town this week, but he'll get it to me by email), but a copy of the publication that had pretty clearly been printed by the secretary, who had spotted a handful of typos, straightened up the part of the story where her notes had not been clear, and circled a large block of type and scrawled "WRONG" across it in red all-caps. Just to be sure I got the message, she attached copies of her previous notes for the part marked "wrong."
I was fine with most of her corrections; I hadn't yet run the spell-checker, which caught everything she caught and several additional typos, and I needed to have the correction on the part that hadn't originally been clear to me. (She also hadn't attached the notes on that part, presumably because she realized they weren't clear.)
But I was at first perplexed and then torqued about the part she had marked "wrong": I checked against her notes three times through to be sure, but what I had written was not wrong at all. The story listed students who had graduated summa, magna, and cum laude; her notes had them as cum, magna, and summa. The only thing "wrong" was that I had reversed the order from her awards-ceremony script to a more journalistic style.
If this were the first time she had jumped on a chance to point out my errors or if she had a record of excellent writing, I might have felt differently. But she is a poor writer (her spelling is always perfect; her grammar often isn't, her style is lousy, and her sense of taste and decorum is dead) with maybe a BBA who no doubt earns more than I do, despite my faculty position and my master's degree.
When I first saw her message, I thought I must have mistyped the names; the list was long and complicated, and although I had asked specifically for the PowerPoint file from the ceremony, she had instead sent me a pdf that didn't allow me to cut and paste. My knee-jerk reaction had been to write back, "Thanks for your comments. You could have saved me from retyping all the names if you had sent me the PowerPoint I asked for instead of the pdf." I have had enough problems with her that I copied the department head; she has a tendency to lie, and I want my butt covered if she does it again.
A few minutes later, I got an email from the boss that said, "You need to be nicer."
I replied, "I was not too happy about getting the newsletter back with a big portion of text circled and marked 'WRONG,' especially since it wasn't. Sorry 'bout that."
His response was, "You make enemies for life."
I told him quite honestly, "In this case, I think that ship has already sailed. And I'm on the short end of life."
I may have just dropped the last straw around there, but I'm really ticked off, anyway. In search of some other numbers recently, I found out that at least one of our secretaries earns substantially more than I do; I haven't heard anything for three weeks from the place where I have done a lot of consulting lately; another of my consulting jobs (which I had hoped to parlay into more work, but maybe not now) has given me four different sets of instruction about how to bill it; and I generally haven't felt very good since I got back from Lubbock, where I think the dry air was good for me.
Among the other jobs I had to do was printing out notes for the handful of students in my summer course, and halfway into that, the printer jammed royally and took me 20 minutes to get it going again. My friend in the office next door came out to lend a hand, and as usual, she also lent her wise and patient ear. She at least reminded me that somebody around there appreciates me, and she inadvertently reminded me that my mentor, who had said something early in the week that sounded as if he had lost faith in me, had also recanted yesterday and let me know he's still sort of on my side, too.
But it's still been a pretty darn sucky Friday.
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