Well, the prank went off as planned.

Alas, I didn't have my digital camera on campus to capture the moment. My colleague accepted the prank with sort of a reserved amusement - "Yeah, guys, really funny. NOW PUT MY WHEELS BACK ON."

The really funny thing? After the students delivered the tires to the office of my colleague (let's call him P.), one of my other colleagues (let's call him T.) decided to pull a prank of his own. While P. and the students were looking at the de-wheeled truck, T. stole one of the tires out of P.'s office and hid it in his own lab.

Thus, when the students went up to P.'s office to show him his tires, they experienced a few moments of consternation when it turned out that only three of the four tires were there. The best part was, T. stood there out in the hall, looking 100% innocent, pretending he knew nothing.

And the tires got put back on.

Yesterday, took a trip to prairies in the Greenville, Texas area. Returned to a mailbox full of spam and four - count them - panicked student messages. I think I do not like this new "post your grades online as soon as you have them done." Everyone checks them and suddenly is outraged that they didn't get an A. I have one student who needs a grade change (and ok, that one was an accounting error) and who doesn't seem to understand the concept that getting the rest of my grading finished is a higher priority than my walking over to the Registrar's office to file a grade change (which very likely is not possible until after grades have been filed; that's how it used to be). It makes me want to scream - I sit in my office for ten hours each and every week of the semester on office hours and no one shows up, but the minute grades are in, I have people calling and demanding a recount.

I'm supposed to be working on research today. I will not have a tremendous amount of patience in dealing with people because the research I am doing takes a good 8 hours to complete, if one is uninterrupted. (I'm waiting on a colleague to get here and work on it with me or I'd have already started. It's not a one-person operation, unfortunately).

It is not good for someone like me, with workaholic and overly-responsible tendencies, to find that the ONE day she leaves campus is the day where everybody needs everything. I'm torn between feeling guilty for taking a day off and feeling irritated that I'm expected to do everything on demand right when everyone wants it, when I've been fairly gracious about accepting late papers, etc.

That said, I've been plugging away at the Kat shawl (see? I did do some knitting) and am now on row 20 (of 45) of the border.