The Venting Thread

[FishProf]

Nooooooooooooooooo! My university email is now protected by two-factor authentication. Sigh.

(But not when accessed by phone...)

How often do you have to sign in with TFA?  We now have SO many barriers to doing work.  If that gets added I'll seriously contemplate retirement.

It's advising week(s) here.  I checked this morning.  It now takes 13* clicks and 7 password entries to get a student advising page up on my computer.  Luckily, all 7 username/passwords are the same...

*Maybe more, but I have some of it automated.

[paddington_bear]

The chairperson of our university's Board of Trustees made some ill-informed and inflammatory comments to our local paper about the state of our university and what he saw as solutions to our budget/enrollment/retention problems (firing some tenured faculty, for one). So now our campus, which is already angry/frustrated/etc about the position we're in and the seemingly ineffectual solutions over the past X years, is even more angry/frustrated/etc.  Our Student Affairs head is leaving, so we'll have yet another interim admin. On the positive side, it was just announced that we're doing a search for almost a dozen positions. I need to win the lottery and get up out of here.

So sorry, paddington bear.  That kind of atmosphere is really tough.

Thanks. It's exhausting. I partly wish that someone would admit that we're a sinking ship instead of every trying to figure out how to patch the holes.

[Parasaurolophus]

For the second time in two months, Amazon has secretly cancelled an item in one of my orders (leaving me no notification, and almost entirely scrubbing it from my purchase history). Wtf?

[filologos]

For the second time in two months, Amazon has secretly cancelled an item in one of my orders (leaving me no notification, and almost entirely scrubbing it from my purchase history). Wtf?

That's bizarre. On a related note: I recently tried to purchase a book on Abebooks. The seller cancelled my order then relisted the book at a higher price. I thought, "Fine, the original price was rather low. I'll pay the higher price," and reordered it. They cancelled again and have not (yet?) relisted it. I then tried to purchase the book at an even higher price from another seller, who first confirmed my order and then cancelled it! What is going on?! Perhaps I am not meant to have this book.

[mamselle]

Perhaps they each only have one and it's selling out ahead of your order, which goes through on the computer before a previous day's inventory adjustment has batched?

Does seem weird, though.

M.

[filologos]

Right, the second one isn't all that unusual: they sold it to someone else, either online on another platform or in-person, before their inventory updated. The first seller's shenanigans are quite odd, and the second seller's cancelling just makes for a strange coincidence in conjunction with the first.

[Parasaurolophus]

For the second time in two months, Amazon has secretly cancelled an item in one of my orders (leaving me no notification, and almost entirely scrubbing it from my purchase history). Wtf?

Customer services kept telling me that I'd never been charged. But my credit card summary showed the charge, and didn't register any refunds that month, or when Amazon cancelled the order. Which implies that I was, in fact, charged. Obviously.

I went around in circles three times with the same customer service rep who concluded, each time, that it must be an "unknown charge" and then transferred me--to himself, to start the whole process over again!


It's resolved now, but that was pretty funny in a Kafkaesque sort of way.

[mamselle]

My eyes would be spinning around in my head after the repeated self-transfers....

Weird!

M.

[apl68]

This was supposed to be my day off.  But here I am at work, practically at the crack of dawn, because our building's alarm system has once again gone off for absolutely no reason at all.  For 17 years I've never had more than a few months at a time when I didn't have to get up in the middle of the night or the wee hours of the morning to deal with this.  There's never once been any sign that anybody was nosing around the building.  It's like I'm on-call 24/7, for no reason at all except to babysit a worthless alarm system.  I wish I could tear the whole system out by the wires.

[sinenomine]

It's the time of the semester for advising students for registration. Normally bright and cogent faculty are pestering me with questions like, "Can an art class be taken for a liberal arts elective," or asking what classes are being offered, despite the schedule being available for everyone. I want to shout, "This isn't difficult, everyone! Do your jobs!" — but alas, I can't.

[mamselle]

This was supposed to be my day off.  But here I am at work, practically at the crack of dawn, because our building's alarm system has once again gone off for absolutely no reason at all.  For 17 years I've never had more than a few months at a time when I didn't have to get up in the middle of the night or the wee hours of the morning to deal with this.  There's never once been any sign that anybody was nosing around the building.  It's like I'm on-call 24/7, for no reason at all except to babysit a worthless alarm system.  I wish I could tear the whole system out by the wires.

The alarm system is lonely.

It wants you to set up a cot in the building so it will never be without you.

M.

[Parasaurolophus]

Here's a typically accurate extract from today's WaPo:

Critical race theory... is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded.

Clearly taken from this, by another guy (I'm not linking, because this is all too stupid):

Critical race theory is a subset of critical theory, which has got long roots in Western philosophy back to Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. Kant lived at the end of a century known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, but he feared that experience had shown that reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives. There had to be a way of knowing things that went beyond reason, and for him that meant developing a theory of being critical of reason, hence critical theory. The problem was that critical theory got away...

My insides just died. Splat.

[Puget]

Here's a typically accurate extract from today's WaPo:

Critical race theory... is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded.

Clearly taken from this, by another guy (I'm not linking, because this is all too stupid):

Critical race theory is a subset of critical theory, which has got long roots in Western philosophy back to Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. Kant lived at the end of a century known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, but he feared that experience had shown that reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives. There had to be a way of knowing things that went beyond reason, and for him that meant developing a theory of being critical of reason, hence critical theory. The problem was that critical theory got away...

My insides just died. Splat.

I don't remember hardly anything about Kant, but that sounds like the sort of thing an undergrad writes in an essay exam when they also don't remember hardly anything about Kant and are just trying to BS something based on the little they remember and that the word "critical" is in there.

[Parasaurolophus]

Here's a typically accurate extract from today's WaPo:

Critical race theory... is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. It was a response to — and rejection of — the principles of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason on which the American republic was founded.

Clearly taken from this, by another guy (I'm not linking, because this is all too stupid):

Critical race theory is a subset of critical theory, which has got long roots in Western philosophy back to Immanuel Kant in the 1790s. Kant lived at the end of a century known as the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, but he feared that experience had shown that reason was inadequate to give shape to our lives. There had to be a way of knowing things that went beyond reason, and for him that meant developing a theory of being critical of reason, hence critical theory. The problem was that critical theory got away...

My insides just died. Splat.

I don't remember hardly anything about Kant, but that sounds like the sort of thing an undergrad writes in an essay exam when they also don't remember hardly anything about Kant and are just trying to BS something based on the little they remember and that the word "critical" is in there.

Yeah, it's clearly Bart Simpson's book report.

[Parasaurolophus]

Upshot of union rep meeting: Looks like the people being screwed on parental leave are all men. Also looks like the shorter your leave, the less of your salary you take home (with a full year netting you nearly 30% more pay than your salary...).

Sigh.