Day 351: first day of the quarter!

back to school bookstore lines

Back to school bright & early this morning.

It was a pretty good first day.

Except for some reason my college email account was deactivated. Also I couldn't get into my employee account to access all my class lists and any other important teacher-y sorts of information. Well, that's not technically true, because the system allows me to log in, but once in, it believes I am a student. I have no instructor privileges or access to student information, but there are all sorts of links to advising information and GPA calculators and links to personal records from this school I never attended. Also when my students got to class they informed me the bookstore didn't have any books for any of the classes I was teaching. I thought I should check into what was ordered, but of course my student account wouldn't let me access information like that, and my bookstore correspondence was locked away in my staff email account.

I did email the tech people for both the email and instructor account issues. They were actually very prompt in replying. . . and informing me that I wasn't an active employee. Also, they reminded me that they weren't obligated (and wouldn't in the future) answer emails from non-school accounts. The problem of needing to request to have my school email activated from an existing active school email account seemed like a very circular and impossible riddle for a Monday morning so I went to the bookstore to try to solve the absent book problem instead.

There were lines everywhere and random bursts of chaos and clusters of my students distributing and trying to buy a book (meant for a cultural anthropology class) that said "humanity" across the front cover.  One of the staff working there was slightly stressed because someone had just found this box of these books somewhere and decided it must be the correct one ("humanity"= intro to humanities textbook, right?) and just started pulling them out and a swarm of other students followed, even though the book wasn't supposed to be on the shelves at all. The other staff person was on the phone with some support line and trying to ignore all this chaos and me, just waving me away with: "I don't know what's going on with Ms.Umphrey. She didn't order any books" and I thought about how nice it was that most of the time people just assume I'm a student rather than whoever this disorganized Ms.Umphrey is who seems to be causing all this disorder in the bookstore.

Since I'd had it clearly explained to me a number of times that I wasn't an employee & these people obviously didn't know who I was, it was very tempting just to go home and read a book or something as not to tamper with my great first day.

But of course I'm more responsible than that. To emphasize this point, I admitted my true identity and solved the book dilemma (which really wasn't my fault!) and then proceed to actually sign and turn in my contracts which were supposed to be turned in the previous day. (Maybe I'm really not an employee? I wonder what that means for all these students that keep showing up?)