I liked the interview, erika.

Thanks.. Sparky, I think your sister has it right...I used to like Jackie Collins for that. Does she publish anymore?

I have a metaphor for the current state of my job:

Work here is like water in a river. During the summer the river runs low. Between September and February, the water level rises to near flood stage, sometimes exceeding the banks and sending water in the wetlands and lowlands. After February, the water level starts receding and continues to recede, save a brief rise in June (for the close of the fiscal year). By the Fourth of July, the river is low again.

This year, though, we have accreditation, and it's as if it hasn't stopped raining for a week. The river is already bank-full. However, the normal rise in the river is now starting as well, and it's already flooded the lowlands and surging into the streets and houses.

Right now, I'm in waist-deep water, and I'm expecting that by December it will be over my head.

And yet, people are coming by and dumping more water into the river.

dw, I'm now realizing how very delinquent I've been in expressing just how sorrowful I am at what you're going through. I handled the re-accreditation for a divisional postdoc program about four years ago, and it was five months of utter fucking hell.

And this was for a program whose administrator was blessedly anal-retentive, who had kept not only the final forms but every scrap of supporting paperwork, with step-by-step instructions for how the research was done to generate that paperwork (including names, titles, phone numbers and email addresses), for everything from the original accreditation almost two decades earlier through every single renewal since then. For one small program that accepts three people a year. And, still, five months of blazing hell. Whenever I think of you having to do this for an entire institution (let alone one as clearly insane, inept, and fatally non-anal-retentive as yours is), on top of all your other job duties, my blood runs cold for you.

I understand how necessary the accreditation process is, but it's crazymaking. And it's never a hundredth as crazymaking for the university presidents and the department chairs as it is for the grunts in the trenches.

Ah...the "jerkoffs upstairs" isn't just for procedurals anymore. I'm sorry about that.

Gronk. Three hour shift and my back hurt so much by the end that I was fighting back tears.

Thanks JZ. The problem isn't that we don't have anal-retentive people around here handling the data (we do, luckily, and they a long time ago decided to put the key pieces of info into a relational, queryable database.) The problem is that we have a bunch of professors who don't know how to write, procrastinate over the writing, and yet want 110% input into everything despite their lack of cooperation with the process.

The problem right now isn't with the data being disorganized but the actual process being sabotaged from on high. On high makes a switch and creates another 20 hours of work.

And oh, we have had four editors (including me) proofing the document and having ongoing arguments in the margins about whether we're using serial commas or not.

Sigh. HULK SMASH.

Day too long. Must leave now. Argh grr grup pow.

And oh, we have had four editors (including me) proofing the document and having ongoing arguments in the margins about whether we're using serial commas or not.

But...of course you must use serial commas.

The serial comma doesn't get enough love.

t /comma traditionalist

If I end up freelance editing this thing, it'll get serial commas.

t sits with AmyLiz