#prof wrangler

[cumaeansibyl]

I got a job

It's one I interviewed for last week: administrator/building manager for the college's new science building. I'll be supporting computer science, environmental science, and the new integrated STEM initiative that's still being finalized (not sure if the director's been hired yet).

Pay's good, bennies are great, it's 5 minutes from the house, and Charles already works for the college (along with a bunch of our friends) so this is a really great setup

Official offer letter is pending once everyone's back from vacation -- I got the call shortly after 5

Also this week the academic job hired my replacement, or at least she accepted, and it's someone I encouraged to apply because I think she'll be great at it so I'm pleased. I need to do some onboarding shit this weekend. I've just got emotional whiplash right now so I'm mostly petting the cat

She's been really supportive

[cumaeansibyl]

A grown professional is throwing a full tantrum in my inbox right now because his org missed a registration deadline and we're not letting him register late

The gist of his argument is "yes, we missed the deadline, but I know you can ignore that so you should, and I refuse to believe it would inconvenience you."

Thing is, after I told the rep no, he went to his boss and his boss went to the president, who came to my boss (the executive director)

... who came back to me, who told him no

Just the fact that I'm constantly being asked to make exceptions on behalf of this or that VIP is one of the reasons I'm leaving this job. Why do we even HAVE rules? Why should I even try to maintain any kind of consistency? How do y'all expect me to get anything done if every time someone fucks up a deadline I have to stop everything to accommodate them?

Anyway, at least my boss backed me up this time, but there's plenty of times he didn't, so no points awarded.

We gonna be clear in the new job, I'm fine if something's a flexible guideline but if you tell me something is a rule, it's gonna be a fucking rule, ruat coelum.

[cumaeansibyl]

to deal with the sudden disappearing room I had to move a bunch of sessions to a time slot they’re not going to like, and I already got the first email asking if we’re gonna reimburse their flight change fees

but I did my best to make moves that affected the smallest possible number of people (22 out of over 1400) so that’s all I could do

it’s always something, isn’t it

[cumaeansibyl]

So we signed our initial contract with the hotel several years ago, and since then there’ve been renovations, meaning that some rooms either stopped existing or had name changes

We discussed this with the hotel and they sent us a list of the rooms that we have reserved. I used this list to determine how many breakout rooms we had.

I’m now being informed that our president and our executive director are to be housed in two of those rooms because when they said we had them on the list, I guess they didn’t mean that the same way I thought they meant that

I believe this can be fixed but our hotel rep is a space cadet who also appears to have forgotten that we determined what meals would be served at our functions back in April, so I’m concerned about what else might be missing

I’m just gonna blame Portland for this, have I mentioned that I hate Portland

[cumaeansibyl]

Boy, it’s been a while since I’ve had this much trouble remaining civil. Or got so stressed I started shivering and tearing up.

I don’t even want to talk about it, it’s just... quitting the conference job was infinity percent the right decision but at the moment I’m regretting not just giving two weeks’ notice

[cumaeansibyl]

Dude just emailed me like “I didn’t finish my conference paper, whoops, hope it didn’t inconvenience you :)) can I still come see some panels tho”

like... we can’t stop you, but fuck you for being like that

[cumaeansibyl]

I had an awful dream last night about the conference job -- there were some people asking angry questions at the registration desk and me trying to explain things to them and the hotel, but mainly I was in a breakout room and I couldn’t find the cable for the presenters to connect laptops to the projector because there were hundreds of cables everywhere, and everyone was waiting

I don’t know if I ever had anxiety dreams about that job while I was at that job, and I hope I never do again, that was awful

(then the cat woke me up wayyyy too early because she wanted pettings, I’m not saying she sensed I was having a bad dream but she probably interpreted the restlessness as “awake and available for pettings” so hey)

[cumaeansibyl]

I noticed some time after the program went to print that one of our participants’ first names had changed from something like Mark to something like Charlotte, so I made sure it was updated in the online program but I didn’t add it to the sheet of printed program changes we hand out (not knowing if she wanted it called out like that)

anyway she just came by to get her badge and I don’t want to be like... weird about it but I was so happy for her because she just seemed like she was having a fantastic day and I hope that’s just how it is for her. seeing trans people out and about being themselves and being happy is the greatest feeling.

our organization has some groups set up to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and they’ve just started a new one for what I guess is being called “queer and trans studies” these days... now on the one hand I thought trans was included in queer, but on the other hand given the recent spike in transphobia it may be a good thing to say “no, we specifically mean trans people too”

anyway it’s interesting to see that our work doing outreach to grad students, early-career scholars, and members of marginalized communities is really bearing fruit. which I can confidently say it is, from having worked at eleven successive registration desks. but it’s also sort of creating a divide between the diverse young students/postdocs/adjuncts and the old white mostly-male emeriti who were there at the founding and have Very Specific Ideas about what they want out of a conference. by which I don’t necessarily mean content (though that comes into it too) but format: they want the printed program, they want everything on paper, they want traditional talks and traditional sessions in the same format they’ve always had, and if we let them they’d still be sending in submissions by mail.