trying to get stuff done, ugh.

Summer school is busy. We have a four day week, which means each of those four days has 20% more stuff in it than it does during the regular semester.

ALSO, offices are supposed to be open from 8 am until 6 pm - to get in the 40 hour work week. But a lot of them still have people taking long lunches as I am learning from trying to work on paperwork during my (brief) break between classes.

(Interestingly, there seems to be an inverse relationship between how much someone is paid and how much of their actual "office commitment" they fulfill - so our secretary, who makes fairly low wages, is ALWAYS here, whereas some of the high mucky-mucks pulling down six figures AREN'T. (nor are even their secretaries, apparently)

The classes are going fairly well though I have one person in one of them that I suspect of being a snowflake-in-training: they are going ON VACATION in the middle of the summer semester and are just counting on making up the work. (Including having me write a make-up exam for them).

However, on the upside - one of my colleagues who isn't even TEACHING one of the classes I teach this summer volunteered to set up its lab for me, because she "curates" the material used in it.

How grateful am I for that? SO grateful. It's a smallish thing but it really, really makes my life easier on an otherwise busy day. It's a huge thing to have good colleagues. I don't think I'd still be in academia if it weren't for the colleagues I have. I know there are many departments where there are factions or people who are really hard to work with all the time. We're too small for factions, and the one or two people who tend to having difficult personalities aren't difficult all the time, and their being difficult is less difficult than many of the difficult people I have dealt with over the years.