I just found out that two people, unbeknownst to me, signed up for an "arranged" sort of class I teach in the summers - a sort of self-paced thing.

But.

The class is supposed to be one credit, and somehow one person signed up to get two, and the other person signed up to get THREE.

And they never came and talked to me or told me about it. (in fact, I only found out because my department chair emailed me to ask, "Why did you let these people leech all these credit hours out of what's supposed to be a one-hour class?")

And the semester is FAST approaching half-over and they haven't begun their independent work that they are supposed to be working independently on.

And they are supposed to get "permission of instructor" first - that is, ME - and neither of them had. (So someone else must have signed them in, or something).

And finally - one of these people is someone who has flaked on things MANY TIMES BEFORE and this person needs the two credits or else they will not graduate BECAUSE of their flakage and I get the feeling I'm being played. And that makes me angry.

And I am just plain angry that I am going to have to devote time/energy to cleaning this up tomorrow. (I'm also mildly irritated by another factor - I have a manuscript ALL READY TO GO IN to the submission process, but it must be converted to a .pdf file first, and I do not have the appropriate software, so I have to send it to someone else on campus, and he is apparently not in today. So I don't get "closure" on that today. No, wait, he just called back, and he can do it.)



But I am going to take a deep breath, and "never attribute to malice what ignorance can adequately explain" and go and find these folks tomorrow, and determine if, perhaps, they signed up for the course in error. Which is possible but unlikely. And if they didn't, to ask them just what the Xphap* they were doing.


(*From an old cartoon out of, I think, The New Yorker - a bunch of alien dudes are standing around. One is bending over and exposing his (its?) posterior to the others. They remark: "Look, Xphap is Earthing us!")