Whine o'clock

I choose to elide details here, but....

I hold 10 hours of office hours a week.

I give assignments that, if it's a longer assignment, like a paper, has about a month of lead-time.

And yet, I get people complaining, "There's NO INFORMATION OUT THERE ON MY TOPIC" AS they are handing the paper in to me. I know that's a total displacement behavior, it allows the person saying it to justify later that I was "unfair" if they don't earn a decent grade on it.

(Yes. And I also assume it means "I started this last night" because honestly? I hold ten office hours a week and am extremely visible around the department. So people can find me when they need me.)

And it makes me SO tired. SO tired. I hauled butt this morning to take care of something I had forgotten to do previously so that class would run smoothly today. No one ever sees me hauling butt to get these things covered, so no one cares. Stuff just magically happens and no one realizes that I woke up at 2:30 in the morning going "Oh crap, I forgot to get That Thing copied that I need for class, so I'll have to take part of my prep-time to do it this morning." Someone else probably wouldn't bother with That Thing and would just tell people, "I forgot," but I can't let myself do that. Everything has to work smoothly.

The other thing is that I very occasionally get a student who seems to want to take all the responsibility for their education and push it on to me. Oh, I have certain responsibilities: running class, setting up lab, instruction, grading. But I can't write their papers or take their tests for them. I can't study for them. And it makes me extremely tired when I get someone who acts that way.

Part of the reason I didn't plan on having children is that the idea of being THAT responsible for another person's life terrified me. If I mess up my own life, fine, okay, it's my problem. If I mess up someone else's life - that's awful. So when someone tries to PUT responsibility they should take onto ME, and then imply I'm somehow failing because I don't do their job for them....well, it just makes me tired.

Ugh. My whole weekend is already spoken for by work so I'm NOT happy on that front. It just makes it worse to hear someone acting as if I'm unfair to expect them to do something educational.

(Also I am wondering when on earth I'm going to get to the wal-mart to get more milk. They don't have the kind I need anywhere else in town. Tomorrow afternoon/evening is out because it's Check Day, and Saturday I will be doing fieldwork. Maybe I GO WITHOUT freaking milk for a few days, I don't know.)