serinde

9:30am and movers not here yet. This is because I'm entirely packed and ready to go. If I were still frantically running in circles, they would have been here at 8:45. I assume they're just lost, or afraid of the ghetto, or something.

...Or they've lost my order. please God no

Edit: Yep. Sure did. Apparently going through 15 minutes of online signing sites was insufficient confirmation, and I was supposed to magically know to then call them back with my credit card.

The revolution has been postponed 'til tomorrow.

So, I've been sitting on the bare floor for four hours, waiting for Verizon. At half past twelve I give up and call them, and actually get straight through to A Human on this continent, mirabile dictu.

"Oh, they've already turned it on. Your order doesn't have any jacks on it, so they didn't need to knock on your door."

but but but the order lady told me....

"I'm sorry about that, but they won't have needed to, so. Anyways it should be on now, why don't you plug a phone in and test."

....because there are no jacks in the apartment. Well, shit. You would think, would you not, that an apartment that's been inhabited since 1872 might have had ONE PERSON WITH PHONE SERVICE LIVING HERE? Ever? At some point? I certainly did, so contemptuously checked "no" on the tickybox. Mais non.

So, I must be here 8am-noon on Tuesday, and will pay a three-digit sum, and the nice man will make inside wiring appear. At least I shall have a chair.

Now to return to NJ, and deliver office cats, and pack more boxes, and make time to meet up with my mom who drove here to give me a coffeepot.

Student email, quoted verbatim:

Hi,

I have a question about online registration. I created a a portal login ID and password, and then tried to register for a Summer 1 class through the eSims site. But it won't let me register. When I mouse over "Registration" on the nav bar on the left, it won't let me click on, and gives me a little box that says something like "appointment April 15 9 am".

Can you explain what this means, and what I should do?


Now this is totally out there, I realize, but how about trying to register on April 15 at 9am?

The so-called "Freedom Tower", replacing WTC, is now no longer the so-called Freedom Tower, but the actually-called 1 WTC. Thank you.

Now if we could just scrape the "Liberty" off of Newark, we'd really be getting somewhere.

For the past week or so, I've been struggling through a whole pile of mental/emotional bees, the form and content of which I shall not weary the Gentle Reader with. I have Gotten Things Done, but not as much as I should like (or as was really necessary), and every damn inch was as hotly contested as your average portion of Western Front entrenchment. Even this morning I was in a state that could, with tolerable accuracy, be described as "a fucking mess" (as poor sweh can bear witness to).

And then, this afternoon, I did tons of packing and organization and cooking and helped nedlnthred rake up the winter detritus in the front yard and Lord knows what else (except laundry). And felt good through all of it. Though now that I stop to reflect, I have a vaguely-unsteady feeling, like if I look around too hard I'll realize I'm running on thin air and then plummet down in approved coyote fashion.

Hopefully I can maintain this; there is still a lot to do and perilously little time to do it in. Tomorrow night is given over to getting taxes done (and picking up Scuzzy from the vet? I hope), Tuesday night I am meeting with the moving people so they can quote how much I shall be soaked for this endeavor, etc. etc. It is, as they say, a long way to Tipperary.

...and sometimes that's enough.

So by sweh's kind DVRination I can watch this new TV show starring Captain Tightpants, which is something about him being a Famous Mystery Writer tagging along with A Real (Hot Female) Detective, team up, solve crimes, blah blah blah. In the inverse of the usual case, we have decent actors soldiering on with material that ranges from the tolerable to the Oh My God How Fucking Cringeworthy Can You Get, and they manage to be just good enough to carry it. Or at least, keep me from flinging the remote across the room until it randomly lands on a different channel. The Police Work[tm] isn't quite CSI bad (or what I hear of CSI, anyways, I have never sullied my virgin eyes with it but it's a favorite LOLtopic in panix.chat), but Lord, it ain't good.

Maybe it's just the divine Nathan. He twinkles.

Mom just forwarded me this link. what.

First of all, I am generally out of sorts today because I am doing a really fucking annoying task I've been putting off for weeks. This delicious turdburger ended up on my plate because, before I took over the student helldesk, I was sort of at loose ends for justifying my existence in my poorly-defined role and so this got chucked at me. It does not require wit or organization or anything except a boundless tolerance for suffering fools (in this case, the College's fucking retarded procedures that would make 1972 blush for shame, but also the bovine indifference of a number of managers who should be more engaged in their reports) gladly.

I do not have this.

Task: Figure out which of our 80-odd hourly employees have vacation time, and how much; and email their managers to say "Fred Bloggs has 42.50 vacation hours accumulated; please make sure he takes it."

Ur-Stupidity: That most of the managers/supervisors in our department don't keep on top of this themselves. They should be able to pull it from the dept.'s time tracking system...though since many of them don't actually ensure the students are using it as they should, the data isn't 100% correct, and then they bitch that it's useless. ANYways.

Stupidity #1: The hourly people can't use their vac time until they've worked 500 hours in the current fiscal year. But, they HAVE to use it all before the end of the fiscal year. This means that, somewhere around, um, now, everyone's time suddenly becomes available.

Stupidity #2: The payroll spreadsheets, from whence we pull this data, are available only with four weeks' lag time. So I'm looking at the state of affairs from Feb. 11th. So some of these students who don't show as having any time available probably do by now--but I don't know for sure.

Stupidity #3: The payroll spreadsheets are printouts--we do not and cannot get them in an electronic format--from some program that's older than I am. There's one for each budget line. The budget lines in no wise line up with who reports to whom. E.g., Lab Guy has a bunch of people paid out of Tech Fee, and some off his own budget line. The "Support Services" budget line has some of my minions, some of spride's, the Notworks Guys' dogsbody, and some random fellow from the training center.

Stupidity #3a: ...and we moved a whole bunch of people to different budget lines this year, so my sense of where to find people is off....

Stupidity #3b: ...but due to the absolute fucking retardation of the payroll system, the moved people appear on both budget spreadsheets. But not with current data. The former budget line has them snapshotted as the last time they were paid out of that budget. With no obvious flagging. So if I forget that Fred Bloggs was someone who was moved, I just go "oh he hasn't made 500 hours yet, nothing to report".

Stupidity #4: For each spreadsheet, are the employees listed in order of last name? No. Seniority? No. They are sorted by Social Security Number. But not the whole one, because we don't want to include those for security reasons; all but the last four digits are chopped off. But it's sorted by the whole number. Basically, there is no way to do this that doesn't involve flipping back and forth and up and down and missing stuff and uleauleauleauleaulea

Stupidity #5: Did I mention that the column headings are only on the first page of each spreadsheet? And that there are ten columns of numbers that represent hours, all next to each other?

So I have to spend a day doing this, and I'll have to do it several more times as we get near the end of the fiscal year, because heaven forfend people should remember things more than a week old, or increment on their own; and it makes me cranky enough. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE

My henchperson calls up from the front desk. "...Can you give students (graduated students, that is) permission to look at their unofficial transcripts?"
Your humble correspondent: "Um no."
[This requires a bit of explanation. There is the Official Transcript, on paper, which one must get from the registrar for, I think, a nominal sum; takes several days or more to acquire; then there is the "Unofficial Transcript", which you can see in eSIMS, the registration program--but you can't log into eSIMS if you aren't a current student.]
Henchperson: "I didn't think so, but I have a student on the phone who I'd just transferred to the Registrar and they told him you specifically could do that and transferred him back."
YHC: *unprintable*

Henchperson, bless her, went on a telephonic voyage of discovery to learn that the Registrar Herself, not just her front-line minions (who run the gamut from "pretty okay" to "how do you tie your fucking shoes in the morning, you idiot") seems to be of the opinion that I, me personally, can greenscreen[1] graduated students back into the Portal so they can log into eSIMS so they can see their stuff. I do not know what gave her this impression, since several months ago there was an extended discussion on this exact topic, because alumni needing transcripts are a common problem, and $FORMER_OFFICEMATE (who can greenscreen people into the Portal, which I cannot) explained at that time to all and sundry that it is a Really Damn Bad Idea to greenscreen former students in as current students because very unusual and unwanted things can happen as a result. I swear to God, the institutional memory down there lasts about three months, and then they flush the buffers entirely, permitting all sorts of new flavors of Wrong to flourish. So now we have to go down and explain it again.

[1] magically put people in by hand, bypassing the usual data feeding process. Usually done for adjunct faculty because their lame-ass departments haven't actually done the hiring paperwork by the start of classes.

syringavulgaris: I haven't learned to say "I'm super-talented" yet.
dariodevil: Sono incazzato!
syringavulgaris: I did learn that I got 100% on the test, though it was 97% before the extra credit.
dariodevil: You are not good enough!
syringavulgaris: Sono una studentessa studiosa!
syringavulgaris: Ho bisogno di caffe.
dariodevil: No, no, no
dariodevil: Are you trying to say you need coffee?
syringavulgaris: Yes. We learned that not ten minutes ago.
dariodevil: You are aware there is formal and conversational language, correct?
syringavulgaris: Yeah, though the only formal bits we've learned about is 2nd person formal.
syringavulgaris: using "Lei" instead of "tu"
dariodevil: That sentence can best be described as formal
syringavulgaris: So how do I say "Jesus Christ I need a coffee"?
dariodevil: Christo, bisogno il caffe!
dariodevil: For bonus points, "Christo de una Mala Donna!" works well.
dariodevil: Try it in class one day
dariodevil: Also, "Porco Dio" is good, too.
syringavulgaris: "mala donna", isn't that "bad lady" ?
dariodevil: Yes. The phrase essentially means "Christ from a whore."
dariodevil: It is a very bad phrase I was told not to say as a child.
dariodevil: My father said it all the time.

Comes now Apartment #12, E. 66th between First and York: 1BR, in that wacky Manhattan way which means "bedroom, living room, kitchen: pick two". The living room (which has the kitchenstuff recessed into a wall per normal studio operations) is 11 X 18, and the bedroom is 11 X 12. But here is the kicker: it's arranged much like #4, only the archway between the sections is smaller, and separated by a pair of folding wooden doors; so you can close it for privacy, or open it for larger social occasions or just a more airy feeling. The bathroom is generous, with a full size old-timey tub like nedlnthred's. The kitchen, though the whole against-the-wall thing, is all new appliances and has a decent amount of cabinetry for what it is (and I picture putting one of my IKEA workbenches parallel to it, to form a sort of mini-railroad-kitchen). One flight up; two living room windows that look out over the back gardens that the ground floor apartments have access to (and a window in the bedroom area that looks into an airshaft, so not much point). It is for a bit under $LIMIT. It's a bit further from work than #10, but that also means I won't have major road work right outside my building, and OH GOSH IT'S A WHOLE FIVE MINUTES FURTHER oh the humanity. No laundry in building, alas. There is a bunch of stuff along First, though, including laundromats.

The building itself dates to 1872, is brick construction, and has lovely mo(u?)lding around the windows &c just like the stuff in Beth's house. The super lives downstairs, works from home, and is clearly Everybody's Mom; she had me in for a cup of tea talking the place up, and there were several tenants who were coming up & down who chatted with her for a minute. So, definitely a nice vibe. She accepts packages, laundry drop-offs, all that sort of thing. Oh, and you can get DSL there, hurrah.

The building isn't as nice as #9, but it's nice enough, and closer (and cheaper). It's not as close and the kitchen isn't as nice as #10, but it's nice enough and close enough, and bigger (and cheaper). It's not as close and not as handsomely appointed as #11, but it's close enough and handsome enough, and bigger (and cheaper). It seems kind of obvious, doesn't it?