the waking giant

At work (my day job) the new semester has kicked in and like a sleeping giant the entire school community has awakened, groggy, fumbling in a stupor, limbs flailing dumbly left and right, realizing they needed to have put something on the web site before the new semester began. They're all insistent. It needs to go up now! The fact that it wasn't up yesterday is suddenly and inextricably my fault the moment they have hit "send" on their email request today.

Is it lead in the water? Back home in KC I use to blame it on cousins marrying. In the Brooklyn fast food chains and grocery stores I counted the years back to the height of the crack-baby epidemic and tried to gage how old the younger salespeople were.

But I am always amazed at how thoughtless and brainless people in education can be. They stop me in the bathroom to tell me about an edit to a web page. ("Excuse me, professor; as long as I have my dick in my hand, if you'll just pass me a sheet of toilet paper under the stall I'll make a note for myself in piss.") They type a page-long submission and bring me the paper print out to type all over again. Their secretaries ask me if I'll make an update to their database because they haven't used it since I last showed them how.

Anyway, I've been at it long enough to know that it will all die down next week and we'll be back to a more manageable pace. Patience. Patience.