Bitterness

People have begun to mention (in very quiet voices) that this blog is a tad bitter of late.

I believe that they are using very quiet voices out of fear that I might, at any moment, explode into teeny weeny bits.

I'm not going to actually rule this out as a possibility, because the icy rage that consumed my body this afternoon could very possibly have been, instead, liquid nitrogen. If this were the case, any sharp tap or even a loud noise might send bits of me scattering like the end of a particular sequel to a particular 80's movie.

I'm pretty sure that I'm being punished by someone up there, so I will type fast lest lightning strike me and fry this transmission along with my computer.

You see, today sucked, if possible... more than yesterday.

Because today I was financially exploited by the college. One of the programs for which I teach - let's call it, er, "Locus of my white-hot anger" or "Hot Locus" for short - is a full-year gig.

This is the first time that Hot Locus is being run, so there are some bugs with the system and things are generally being made up as we go along. Now, I worked with the Hot Locus program all summer and things went exactly as I was told that they would.

But now the administrator of Hot Locus has decided to change the rules. We'll call her Betty.

Now Betty calls me up months after I have asked her to meet with me and let me know what she expected of me this year and says "let's meet".

"Cool" say I, "I'll see you tomorrow"

Then Betty starts trying to get myself and my partner - let's call him Bob- Betty asks Bob and I what days we are free. So we tell her. Betty is displeased with what she hears and asks us if we are free any other times. Wanting to indicate to Betty that I haven't been issued the university be-in-two-classes-at-once-device but also realizing that is a bad idea, I say "sorry, Betty - those are the times that Bob and I are free"

Betty then asks if we can teach on Sundays.

Sundays?

Betty is clearly not hoeing beans in the same university fiefdom where I hoe MY beans.

Bob and I dodge this question and then agree to meet with Betty later.

Betty then starts concocting strange schedules for meetings with students that will take about, oh, 3 times the number of hours that Betty, Bob, and I agreed that we will be working this quarter.

We say "Betty - we didn't think that we would be working this many hours"

Betty seems confused "But you don't want to teach these students for 25zillion hours a week?"

No Betty, we don't - "We want to teach these students for the 4 hours a week we agreed on at the beginning of the summer"

I believe that Betty is getting bitter. We eventually agree on something vaguely close to reasonable.

Bob checks on how many, er... sacks of grain... we are supposed to get for all this teaching. We believe that we are supposed to get 7500 sacks of grain for the year. Betty says - "nono, you are only getting 6250 sacks of grain".

I'm sorry?

This is when I had a hallucination of jumping across the desk and killing Betty.

"Are you telling me that there is some "mistake" by which we are missing 1250 of our SACKS OF GRAIN? We were promised SACKS AND SACKS OF GRAIN."

Apparently, Betty informs us, we were misinformed at the beginning by someone else - not her of course, because she would never lie because Betty isn't like that...

And then Betty says "You know, I was a grad student once too and I know about being exploited. Do you feel like you are being exploited? Because I want you to tell me if you feel like you are being exploited."

Gee, Betty - you just asked me to do more work that I was supposed to do for less pay than you promised me. I NEED THIS GRAIN SO I CAN EAT THIS WINTER, BETTY. I’m feeling just a touch angry with you sitting over in your desk with a nice red leather jacket talking to me about exploitation. 1250 sacks of grain don’t mean much to you, Betty, but they mean a lot of ramen to me.

Yeah, this sounds like exploitation. Apparently there was some kind of grain blight and the program just doesn't have as many sacks as they thought they would have. Now if Betty had a sack at all she would go over and request the grain from the head of her department. But Betty has no sack.

So Bob and I are officially exploited by the University fiefdom.

I would quit, but I really need the sacks of grain (such as they are).

I promise I will post something nice the very day when nothing APPALLINGLY BAD happens to me, really.

It will be about rainbows, kittens, sunshine, and lollipops.