Thursday, April 27, 2017

Don't fail me now, fingers!

My finger started twitching in the middle of the Faculty Council meeting yesterday--the final Council meeting of  my two-year term, so I should have been celebrating a successful completion of a heavy service load, but it was my turn to take minutes so I had to focus on transcribing my colleagues' brilliant thoughts into notes on a Word document, which was hard to do after my finger started twitching.

My right index finger, of course--or, if you prefer, my point-and-click finger. That whole arm has been sore since Monday afternoon, when I did some weed-whacking for the first time this season, and since then I've been working my way through the usual end-of-the-semester pile of student prose, all online documents into which I insert comments by means of pointing and clicking and tap-tap-tapping on the keyboard. The result is a sore arm and a finger that keeps moving even when I want it to stop, not constantly but often enough to be annoying.

I've suffered this problem before and I know the solution: give the arm a rest! If I keep the shoulder away from the weed-eater and the finger away from the keyboard for a few days, the twitch will go away.

But that pile of papers isn't going to grade itself, and next week I'll have four sets of final exams to grade, not to mention all the pointing-and-clicking required for submitting grades and assessment data. This is a really bad time to be saddled with a wonky arm and twitchy finger. Give me a week to get all my end-of-semester stuff done and I'll be happy to give the arm  a rest, but meanwhile, I'm just going to have to carry on.

Unless I can find someone to carry me. Buddy, can you spare an arm? 

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