Raked over the coals 6-18-04
Jun. 18th, 2004 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kilroyI'm not even sure I can type at the moment. I'm exhausted, upset, depressed, angry. I nearly had to go and take a screaming break earlier today, and I did put a foot-sized dent in an innocent filing cabinet. But I need to write this down.
Politics at work suck. The title of this entry isn't strictly accurate... I never actually got raked over the coals. But I was living in constant fear of it all day, and came close to it four times. First I skipped a meeting between Brenda and George whereupon she apparently took his head off; this was about whether or not the students would be dropped, disappeared, failed, or their grades altered. I in fact lied to my boss to get out of this meeting, but I don't feel particularly bad about that; the question of whether to unilaterally drop students from the course is not one I get to answer. Still, George came back to the office to take it out on me a little. He was fairly gentle (dejected, really), and I managed to deflect him. But he said that I needed to talk to Brenda, so that I too could get my head torn off.
This did not please me. It still doesn't, and the meeting's still going to happen. But later today George and Debra and I got together to chat. I expected Debra to be tiger-raging; she wasn't. She was actually the most firmly on my side of anyone, for which I am retroactively very grateful. However, she told me that Jerry said that I had to change my grades because "I wasn't allowed to fail kids." I nearly exploded in the conference room; in reality, I probably kept it to a low sputter. Consequently I was assigned to call Jerry up to argue with him, as a prelude to being decapitated by Brenda.
Day had now officially burnt to the ground. After the meeting I was photocopying my finals (so Debra could look them over and "see if I graded them right"), when Jerry called. He asked who was there, was told I was in the next room, and within a few moments was talking loudly about "The Sean Issue." At which point I loudly closed the door to the room I was in, and seethed. Eventually I got invited into the conversation, and I sat as low in my chair as possible to try and avoid the blast from the speakerphone. It didn't come. Jerry basically said "Oh, I didn't actually read the fully informative email you sent me. And I misinterpreted what Debra told me two hours ago. It's cool." (emphasis added)
George left happy, Debra left agreeing with me (having flipped through those finals), and I was left to lock up the office. So I sat down here and typed this instead. Now, the account above is a light, ironical interpretation of today's office farce. For an alternate version of events, I refer you to a conversation I actually had with one of my coworkers somewhere in the middle of this:
"So what are you going to do?"
"Well, first I'm going to take an icepick to George's head, then probably an axe to Brenda. And then I'll set Debra on fire."
"Sounds like a full day."
Politics at work suck. The title of this entry isn't strictly accurate... I never actually got raked over the coals. But I was living in constant fear of it all day, and came close to it four times. First I skipped a meeting between Brenda and George whereupon she apparently took his head off; this was about whether or not the students would be dropped, disappeared, failed, or their grades altered. I in fact lied to my boss to get out of this meeting, but I don't feel particularly bad about that; the question of whether to unilaterally drop students from the course is not one I get to answer. Still, George came back to the office to take it out on me a little. He was fairly gentle (dejected, really), and I managed to deflect him. But he said that I needed to talk to Brenda, so that I too could get my head torn off.
This did not please me. It still doesn't, and the meeting's still going to happen. But later today George and Debra and I got together to chat. I expected Debra to be tiger-raging; she wasn't. She was actually the most firmly on my side of anyone, for which I am retroactively very grateful. However, she told me that Jerry said that I had to change my grades because "I wasn't allowed to fail kids." I nearly exploded in the conference room; in reality, I probably kept it to a low sputter. Consequently I was assigned to call Jerry up to argue with him, as a prelude to being decapitated by Brenda.
Day had now officially burnt to the ground. After the meeting I was photocopying my finals (so Debra could look them over and "see if I graded them right"), when Jerry called. He asked who was there, was told I was in the next room, and within a few moments was talking loudly about "The Sean Issue." At which point I loudly closed the door to the room I was in, and seethed. Eventually I got invited into the conversation, and I sat as low in my chair as possible to try and avoid the blast from the speakerphone. It didn't come. Jerry basically said "Oh, I didn't actually read the fully informative email you sent me. And I misinterpreted what Debra told me two hours ago. It's cool." (emphasis added)
George left happy, Debra left agreeing with me (having flipped through those finals), and I was left to lock up the office. So I sat down here and typed this instead. Now, the account above is a light, ironical interpretation of today's office farce. For an alternate version of events, I refer you to a conversation I actually had with one of my coworkers somewhere in the middle of this:
"So what are you going to do?"
"Well, first I'm going to take an icepick to George's head, then probably an axe to Brenda. And then I'll set Debra on fire."
"Sounds like a full day."