Making a nuisance of myself, maybe

I'm sitting in the lobby outside some administrative offices wondering to what extent I ought to make a nuisance of myself.

Some would say I've spent 22 years making a nuisance of myself and I ought to hang back and let some others pick up the slack, and they have a point. I am aware that I do an awful lot of complaining and demanding and grumbling about every stinking little thing that goes wrong on campus.

But on the other hand, I'm being only a minor nuisance here today. As it happens, this lobby has fast, strong, reliable wireless internet service, while my office, at the moment, has ... nothing. Or nothing usable. It took me nearly an hour this morning just to upload a single document to our new course management system, with a hard-wired internet connection in my office that kept disconnecting at random or running at speeds so slow that I couldn't even check my email. I'm accustomed to that kind of service at home, but not on campus.

We're required to use the new course management system but it's going to be pretty hard to do that if I don't have enough connectivity to upload a single document. One option, of course, would be to simply print out all those documents instead of making them available online. In one class I have around 200 pages of readings I need to make available to 18 students, which would be an obscene amount of printing even if we weren't in the middle of a serious budget crisis. And that's just one class!

I have a limited amount of time to get my courses ready before classes start next week, but fortunately, our crack IT staff is on the job. Yes! They have a solution: "Have you tried turning it off and turning back on again?"

Yes, in fact, I have seen every episode of The IT Crowd and I know that's the first step to solving any IT problem, so that's actually the very first thing I did when the problem started. It didn't help. 

And so instead of doing my important prep work in my comfy campus office, I'm sitting in the busy lobby outside some offices where our top administrators enjoy excellent internet access along with the power to require us to use a new course management system that I am not actually capable of using because there's no usable internet connection in my office.

I'm working steadily and quietly and without a lot of fuss and so far I haven't made a nuisance of myself, but give me some time and you never know what might happen.