Next week is the last week of classes, right?
And I have two exams to write this weekend, and one to grade, and there's always the research I never get around to working on. And I have to start prepping my finals.
And I have no dishwasher yet, and no ETA on one. And Monday I have to take my car out and leave it at least all day at the dealer (who does no loaners but have made a shaky promise that someone from there will drive me in to campus Monday morning, and no, there is not Uber in my town either and I don't have a smartphone anyway). Because the airbag recall. (I would like every Takata employee who knew of this, every other employee of everything who helped cover it up, be required to come over here and be the driver for everyone inconvenienced by the recall for a day)
Also next week our candidates are coming in which means extra time in meeting them....and oh crap, I probably need to clean up my office a little if they are going to meet with me. Well, maybe I just shove everything on a cart and hide the cart in my prep room....)
So anyway. I have this one student, right? (Well, I have MANY students, but I also have a few who think they are my only one). Said student is an athlete and they also have missed about 3/4 of the class meetings and more than 3/4 of the work. They have claimed illness but have never shown me doctor's notes, and have made, by my count, three appointments over the past two months to come in and try to make up the material. And they have missed every one of those appointments.
The most recent one was Wednesday morning. I told them, "I have office hours between 8 am and 10 am," I said that in an e-mail, my office hours are posted on my office door, they are in the syllabus.
Student never showed. I kind of wrote it off as "typical" but also did warn my chair "Hey, this is what's up, in case this student comes to you with a tale that I am Unavailable*"
(*I have had it happen before. Spring 2012. The student who claimed to have no sense of time, who implied I should have called him before each lab and each scheduled meeting so he'd know to show up. The student who had a Pocket Administrator who called me up and basically demanded I accept work well past its due date because said student was Special**. AKA the student who very nearly broke me)
(**"You're so (frelling) special, I wish I were special")
Anyway. Guess who I got an e-mail from this morning?
Two things in the e-mail:
"I guess I showed up at the wrong time" and "When is your next free hour?"
Okay, first things first: If this is going to turn into a whole You Were Not Available thing with administrators getting involved, I'm just done. That's it, stick a fork in me. Maybe this is evidence that my parents really DO need me as live-in help and screw not having much of a financial future and also I hate screwing over my department, but if every five years or so I have to defend my honor as a professor against someone who thinks I am a servant and who gets angry when I don't jump when they clap for me....I'm out. I'm done. I'll sell my house and move my crap up to my parent's house (well, I'll sell 90% of it) and stay up there and hope they leave me the house in their will, and for money....well, I don't know. Maybe I set up an etsy shop and knit stuff. Or maybe I see if there's a yarn shop or a quilt shop that needs a teacher. If I have a roof over my head and if my parents are willing to pay for my food I won't need much money.
And the second thing: You have my freaking office hours. There are literally three different places you can look them up. I still told him though. But I bet he doesn't show. And I bet I get blamed somehow.
I just....I want to put my head down on my desk and cry. This whole week has been horrible and this is just the capper on it. I get so tired of having to carry everyone else's stuff plus my own, and I have NO ONE to help me carry my stuff. So often my stuff is the stuff that gets dropped.
(I called the Lowe's long-distance number that was in my "missed calls" log yesterday. Oh my Bob, what a cluster that was. Apparently it was actually going to be a 'take a survey about our service' call, but they didn't leave a message and so I figured "Oh, they are calling about the install" and after three separate rounds of button-mashing (I hate phone trees) and two long, long hold periods, I got a not-entirely-clueful young woman who didn't know what was going on, who then patched in the local store to the call, and as it turned out, no, no one had called about an install BUT I DIDN'T KNOW THAT BECAUSE THERE WAS NO MESSAGE LEFT AND I JUST SAW THE NUMBER and I admit I was less gracious that I might have been at first but I wound up telling them, "Well, I guess I wait another week for a dishwasher because we are interviewing job candidates and I have some 14 hour days ahead of me next week" and after I rang off I just sat and cried for a little bit because that call ate up a literal half-hour of my life and got me bupkis.)
I'm just....it's nothing very big really but it's a million little things and I am super super super discouraged right now. (And also: no, I did not win the teaching award. I didn't expect to, and I'm not angry about the person who did win, but....it would have been nice. It would have gone some distance towards restoring my happiness with this job which is at a low ebb right now)
I don't know. I SHOULD work this weekend, at least writing my exams ahead, but I also just....I don't know what I want. There's been just too much too fast and I can't wrap my head around it and I'm still shaking a little bit from worrying about my mom but I don't really get a chance to take a breath and decompress. I know it's only 2 more weeks before I'm done with the semester but I really need a breather now, I just can't take one.
And I know, I idealize "having a relationship" but I look at all of this and think, "If only i were married and my husband were a good person, some of this would be easier - he could drive me back from the car place and also I'd not worry about "but how do I get home" if the car doesn't get done by the time they close, and I'd have someone to 'talk me down' about the demanding students, and MAYBE Lowe's would listen to a deep male voice a little better than a treble feminine one...." And yes, I know, there are relationships that are tire-fires and there are cases where having a spouse is like having a child and you have more extra work....but not all of them are like that.
I don't know. Maybe there needs to be a business where you can just HIRE someone to deal with this, hire a driver and someone to go sit at the Lowe's install department until they give an ETA, and then sit at my house to let the installers in while I work. I bet in big cities those businesses exist, but not here: you're expected to impose on family or, failing that, friends. And I don't like imposing on my friends.
****
And I'm also thinking of something I read elsewhere online, where someone commented that something they weren't prepared for about adulthood is "how much of the time you're alone, because your friends are all busy and you just have to get used to hanging out by yourself" and now I am wondering if maybe it isn't just me (that I don't have enough close friends, that I keep people too much at arms' length) and if it isn't just yet another curse of the modern world that unless you're part of a family unit you are just going to be alone a lot of the time?
I don't know. I used to be better at being alone and liking it, but now I often feel a bit of a void when I am alone for very long.
I also admit, and I know this is a side effect of being too busy with things I really don't want to do, but I feel very envious of the people who are tweeting about things like going to the various new movies that are opening, or going hiking in a park, or just generally doing fun things, especially fun things with friends. And yes, I know, some people show off their life as shinier and better on social media than it actually is, but...yeah. I just wish I had someone in my life who would call me up and go "I want to go see 'Shazam,' are you interested in going too" and I know, I know, I probably need to be that person but I also don't know anyone I think would want to go see "Shazam" with me, and I can't deal with calling people up and hearing them make polite excuses and maybe feeling like "well it's really because they don't want to hang out with me more than that they're actually busy..."
***
Edited to add: I just found out my chair is getting "kicked upstairs" to a different admin position. DAMMIT. I know everyone in my department is going to 100% do the "NOT IT" thing about being chair; it's a pretty thankless task and while it carries more pay and sometimes course release, it is NOT ENOUGH to compensate for the added workload.
I already told the colleague who is my best friend of the colleagues that I didn't think I should do it because it would LITERALLY kill me (and I do not mean literally figuratively; I am already hypertensive and tend to eat my feelings).
Also, heigh-ho, overloads for all this coming fall, and another search committee in the spring.
This week is completely and utterly fired. I shudder to think what news next week may bring.
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