The Wall

I hit it today.

It's strange, or maybe just frustrating, how you can be both really busy and feel like nothing much got accomplished.

~Got up at 7, showered, had breakfast, checked email, and then headed to campus around 8:30.

~Attended completely inane meeting at 9 where colleagues (staff/admin, not faculty) are completely unprofessional and push sycophancy to new heights (or is it depths?). Am told at the end of the meeting that I can now come to the front to get my "snack bag," presumably as a reward for attending the meeting. I almost fell out of my chair. Snack bags?

~Spent more time than I really should have debriefing with a colleague after said meeting. We did actually do some productive thinking/talking there (we work closely together, so some of this talk is really about getting to know each other and building a relationship so that we can work well together).

~Ate lunch at my desk.

~Sent an email to the student from the last post. And got an enthusiastic reply back from student not too soon after. (No, I didn't switch my position--I still said no).

~Emailed/IMed with my co-coordinator for a conference that we're organizing.

~Chatted with a couple of staff members about a project I'd like their help with.

~Held a follow-up meeting with another staff member. This was somewhat messy, and expected to be. I'd observed this staff member in action last week and this meeting was a debriefing session. This is actually part of my job: to observe the staff as they work, talk with them about it, and give them feedback/guidance to help them be better at it. Reasonable, right? They seem to be completely freaking out about this. Some believe that I have no right to observe them; some believe that I'm judging them; some are just stressed out by being observed. That last part is understandable, but good god is it exhausting trying to be patient with the rest of it. This particular person is defensive on a good day, so this meeting was especially fun.

~Tried to observe another staff member, but that didn't pan out, so chatted with him instead. Trying to develop a relationship with individual staff members, so that was productive in it's own way.

~Clicked around on the interwebs aimlessly for a while until the office closed up. Needed to make sure the defensive person left on time so that other staff could actually leave on time. Left campus at about 5, maybe a 4:45.

~Headed home, chatted with Chica for a bit, then lifted a bit of weights and went for a 3 mile run. Then we came home, had homemade banh mi for dinner (Chica makes banh mi much better than restaurants do; we tell the banh mi shop around the corner that we're just buying their french bread to make garlic bread because you can't really tell them we're going to make our own sandwiches at home), and now we're about to watch a movie and chill for the night.