Not good morning

This is how I feel (not Gordon Ramsey, the woman he is berating):

(And I would have *sworn* I saw a ponified version of that somewhere, but Know Your Meme turns nothing up, and I am unwilling to wade into the deeps of Google Image Search because when you search ANYTHING ponified, even with safe-search....well, after the first page or so of results, Then There Be Monsters)

But yeah. I came in to a message from my new grad student: hey, what am I supposed to do about this new online training they're saying we have to do?

and I am like, "what online training" (well, not quite: I saw a sign advertising it when I went to pick up an interlibrary loan book at the library yesterday). I don't know anything about it. Her big concern was "How do I get this to work from home, I can't do it on my Mac"

So I said, "I'll e-mail the person in charge and find out" but I'm fully expecting to get an e-mail back from them asking "How can you not know that?" even though I checked my CMS page and I checked all my archived e-mails and found NOTHING referring to the program.

So either:

1. We are being purposely kept in the dark about this (seems unlikely)
2. Someone forgot to tell us about it (this seems very likely)
3. Someone forgot that some of us still teach exclusively face-to-face and would not have experienced learning about it in the course of prepping for online classes in the fall (which also seems likely, and raises my fears that those of us few dinosaurs who still would rather not teach online are going to become second-class citizens. Well, hell, you can take my red stapler and move my desk to the sub-basement, but I've got 10 years until retirement and I sure as hell am hanging on if at all possible)

So I don't know. I feel bad I couldn't do more for the student than "ummm let me check" but, whatever.

Tomorrow starts the round of meetings. Tomorrow: meet and greet and eat pastries at 8 am, talks run from 8:30 to noon. Thursday we have stuff from 10 am until 2 pm or so. Friday is departmental meeting, I think at 9? But two of those days the most productive chunk of the day is spent sitting in meetings. At least it looks like we're not being subjected to the active-shooter demo this year; I've been through that, I think, three years running (maybe 4) and it's not that helpful - it's kind of traumatizing and also, when faculty raise the issue of "but we can't lock our doors from inside the classroom" the state trooper who is hired to speak to us goes "Hmmm that's a problem" and proposes a solution that would cost $10 a classroom but which has yet to be implemented, and I feel like: going through "training" for a vanishingly unlikely event where the simple thing that could be done to help prevent it won't be invested in - why make your faculty have nightmares? Maybe someone figured that out this year.

But yeah. I am in one of those moods where everything bothers me, because I feel like:

1. The things I am good at are literally worthless in what the world has become - if my university were to close* I'm not sure how I could keep body and soul together, and I don't think I've saved up enough money in my retirement fund to glide through the rest of my life that way.

(This was precipitated by some discussion elsewhere of vocabulary levels and the idea that those of us with bigger vocabularies will eventually be pressured not to use so many high-falutin' words (like, ever) lest we make others feel bad. One of my few claims-to-fame, such as it is, is having a big vocabulary - I read a lot, I remember what I've read, and I was a spelling bee geek back in the day so I learned things like Latin and Greek word roots. I can also make stuff, but seeing the agony that some artists have written about on Twitter and elsewhere, about either being asked to work 'for exposure' or do commissions for less than what the supplies cost. And you have to be an eternal salesperson, which I can't do. And I can teach, but yeah, you see how much THAT is valued in what passes for the "real world" these days)

2. What IS valued right now seems to be a lack of compassion, "sharp elbows," and a willingness to bend the rules to suit yourself, and not only are those things I can't do, they're things I don't want to do.

So I'm kinda doomed, it feels like.


(*a former state governor is floating the idea of "consolidation" of the regionals, and I don't want to see us in a Battle Royale with the school up the road an hour from us, 'cos if it's "Two ecologists enter, one leaves," I will be, by virtue of fewer meaningful publications and grants, be the one looking for new employment, and I am quite sure under a "consolidation" event, that "but I had tenure and seniority" will count for dogspit, I will be thrown out onto the job-seeking front with no backup)


So yeah. I don't know. This is my last day of Summer and I'm not happy. I'd love to get an e-mail back from the person in the tech office saying "My bad, we should have let faculty know, here's the solution" but I am not expecting that to happen.

But yeah. I am not feeling especially competent today and that's not a good feeling less than a week before classes start.


****

Well, maybe I'm not as dumb as I look. I received an e-mail this morning that made me suspicious for three reasons:

First, it purported (in the body of the e-mail) to be from our uni president, but the "by line" in the header was someone else somewhere else

Second, it had an attached "secured" .pdf (did not open! Danger, Will Robinson!)

Third, our university president is an attorney and has a good command of the English language and with faculty he also has a tendency not to use more words than necessary to get his point across, and here's the text of the e-mail:




Dear Colleagues:

Our aim is to provide guidance and align our behaviors as we make great decisions that impact our daily operations. we rely on our values and this code as guidelines, as a breach of the Policy may result in disciplinary action against the Employee concerned.
all individuals on full-time or part-time employment with the Institution are required to go through the guidelines attached in this email. It is important that we all adhere to these guidelines so you will be helping to ensure a future success of this great institution

Thank you for your ongoing commitment to delivering a better and reliable service."


 I forwarded it to the IT guy with an "I may be being overly cautious but...." and he e-mailed back "It's phishing" (I presume the "secure .pdf" was to be filled in with personal info) "Delete it and I am going to try to recall it out of the other mailboxes."


We have people who tend to fall for that kind of thing...we had someone lose their hard-drive contents to a Cryptolocker scheme this spring) So maybe I'm not such an "idiot sandwich" after all. But yeah. Vague threats plus the university president's name made me ALMOST fall for it.