The Bureaucrats Are Winning…

So I have one duty left for this semester — to input the syllabi for next semester by next Friday. I said to the office assistant who reminded me of this, “Okay, but if I enter it later, it doesn’t matter, right? There’s some time closer to semester when this is possible, right? Because when I started working here, [previous previous office assistant] told me it was no big deal and I could enter my syllabi later on…”

“Oh!” she said, with wide eyes. “But that has a negative effect on your evaluation.”

“Huh?”

“Your points. You will have fewer points in your yearly evaluation if you enter the syllabus later.”

“But I don’t know what I’ll be teaching,” I said. “Does it matter if I just enter my old syllabus?

“No, that’s fine. You can change it later. You won’t lose points. It’s just so that you enter something by the deadline. Anything.”

I gave her a funny look, and she laughed and agreed: “It’s silly!”

This was the same morning she messaged to let me know that the bizarre, write-basically-the-same-information-on-three-different-forms grade change application paperwork would be unnecessary if we changed the grades before 5pm Friday. (Thank goodness, because I don’t know what I was going to hand in for that course’s “exam” paper, since after all it was an oral exam: the student got up and debated a point in front of 50 people.)

Then I faxed my almost 2-years-old paperwork to my previous employer to try get my pension money from back in 2005. (I worked a year under a private pension, and apparently you can collect it back within 2 years of leaving that visa, in  this case, an E-1 visa. It kept forgetting to fax the paperwork in, and it took me until now to get around to it, foolish me. Knowing my luck, the deadline according to this private pension company was a year ago or something. But, no, I have hope. It was a branch of the government that was the recipient of the paperwork, and they promised a two-week turnover. I guess I’ll find out later…)

And I was informed that it would be okay for me to pick up the book I had handed in to support the renewal of my contract, as long as I was willing to hand in the page proofs of the manuscript in lieu of the printed book. That’s right, they want 50 pages of my students’ poems to add to the several-hundred pages of syllabi, handouts, archived exams, and more. Don’t know if anyone will ever read it. Maybe they’ll just weigh my dossier?

All that paperwork. Sometimes you have to wonder where the bureaucrats file it, don’t you?

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