Insert sound of head exploding here. I started work again yesterday, and I haven’t had a moment’s rest here since. Within five minutes of being here, there were already several things to be done such as helping with the last day of late registration, meetings and working on my syllabi for the two sections of University 101 that I’m teaching this fall. Heather, my officemate, is likewise teaching a section of the class, and seeing as how she has never taught a college class before, I began working with her to help her come up with a syllabus while trying to explain how she can run her class. We were constantly interrupted in our endeavor to set up our classes, however, by being pulled out for meetings across campus. After that came the students. All manner of students: those needing new schedules, those wanting to drop a class, those wanting to add a class, those needing information about their classes, and more. I barely got any work done on my syllabus, and neither did Heather. While my classes are on Tuesday and Thursday, hers are on Monday and Wednesday. Since classes start Wednesday, she’s got until tomorrow to get something rough worked out. Dandy, eh?

Then there’s today. I got here early again, hoping that maybe I could get some work done before things got too hectic. I did, for a brief amount of time early in the morning before students began flooding in. I was trying to make phone calls throughout the day to possible guest speakers for my class so I can finalize my syllabus, but students kept coming in. Add to that the fact that the advisor’s menu on my ISU login suddenly decided to stop working so that I couldn’t add or drop classes for students myself. It kept giving me a “break-in” error. Freaky. After about a half hour on the phone with the IT help desk, I gave up until this afternoon when after playing phone tag a half dozen times, I got ahold of someone who could tell me that it had been taken down for all advisors on their logins. Okay, problem solved, sort of. I think that I’ve spent about two or three hours total on the phone today. I nearly didn’t have a lunch hour because they kept bringing students back, even after noon. I finally got to go to lunch at 12:35, and even then I had to fight them to keep them from bringing back more students.

So far, the outcome from this is that I’ve cleaned out several of my e-mail accounts, I’ve gotten some photocopying done, I’ve helped some dozen or more students (either in person or on the phone), I’ve registered for my thesis hours (finally), I’ve gotten a little more of my syllabus worked out, I’ve made some sort of contact (e-mail or telephone) with all of my possible guest speakers, I’ve semi-reorganized my desk after it became a disaster, and I ate an orange. Somewhere in there I had a soda as well because my officemate realized I wasn’t getting anywhere anytime soon, so she brought me one. She’s so sweet. At least today I’m wearing comfortable shoes so the walk back to the opposite end of campus in an hour and a half won’t be so painful. I have to park on the opposite end because it’s the closest student lot that I can park in on campus. Dippy. Oh well, more walking equals more burned calories.

I’m tired, I’m cranky, and I want to lie down for an hour after all this mess. My biggest complaint right now is the fact that I still have an hour and a half to go before I can escape, and that things aren’t going to slow down until September. Speaking of September, I don’t get paid until September 9. The next couple weeks are going to suck ass. Huzzah. I’m gonna go make some photocopies right now. Desk jobs are easy, my ass.