fried

Oh, man, my brain is fried. I've been grading like crazy all afternoon (this is after teaching a 75 minute lecture class - WHICH ARE TOOLS OF THE DEVIL, I TELLS YOU - and a two-hour lab. The two-hour lab is our fourth lab of the semester and I had a student show up for the first time for lab.

I was too shy to ask him why. I always assume there's some good reason, like he was deployed or in jury duty or somesuch. So I went and found the coordinator of the class after the lab was over, and I asked her.

"Um...he JUST showed up to lab?" she said. "Oh, he's one of THOSE."

Meaning - people who show up to class when the fancy strikes them.)

But anyway. I'm mongo tired now and I still have 2+ pages on an exam I gave yesterday to grade. It's "grown ups game night" at church tonight but I AM NOT GOING. I do not feel like it. Maybe it's ratty of me to say this, but I really don't care if only six people show up tonight and it's not able to go because of too few people. I've been to this thing every month - even some months when there were only FOUR of us so I wound up playing Scrabble with this 85-year-old woman who, I swear, was very very close to saying "I will CUT you!" when you took "her place" on the board.

And I can't deal with that tonight. Even if I get a designed-to-induce-guilt, "We were just wondering if maybe you...forgot...." phone call.

I was out at church two nights already this week. I think God will understand. I really really need some quiet time.

And this is a little early for Emily's Friday tradition, but I'm gonna note it here anyway:

If someone is doing something for you on a volunteer basis, that means, on top of all the stuff they already get paid for (and the stuff that they don't but that is kinda sorta expected on top of the paid stuff), you do NOT have the right to leave them long rambling phone messages accusing them of not being 'willing' to help you any more, and of thwarting your deepest and most dearly held desires, if it takes them more than two days to get back to you after you called before.

Sometimes people are just crazy busy. Or, for that matter, sometimes people have relatives die. Or they get sick. Or something. (I always wondered why it was the people who needed the most slack cut for them who were the least willing to cut slack for others).

And under no circumstances do you have the right to go all haughty and entitled on them. What part of "doing this out of the goodness of my heart" do you not understand?

Oh, and another thing: If you are calling from a cell phone, and you leave your phone number, recite it at least twice: at the beginning and the end of the call. I had an angry phone call from someone asking "why didn't you callllll meeeeee baaaaaaack" when in fact, her phone cut out precisely as she was delivering the exchange of her phone number. As we have approximately eight different exchanges here (thanks to cell phones), I can't just guess and play phone-bingo.