Antidotes for summer panic

Of course it's ridiculous to suffer a midsummer panic attack when summer hasn't, technically, even started yet, but the academic calendar skews everything so that June is my only real month off all year, though it's not entirely off because I have to attend webinars (yuck) and preside at meetings to plan events funded by the grant I'm administering, a task that will double in size in July, when I will also have to plan orientation for incoming faculty (and yes, I'm glad we have a few new hires this fall, since last year I planned the entire all-day event for exactly one new faculty member) while also preparing syllabi for two or, possibly, three classes, one of which I'm completely rejiggering, and the word possibly back there is another reason I'm a little stressed out since, for reasons I can't disclose, I won't know for another couple of weeks whether I'll teach that third (very important) class and I refuse to start working on fall syllabi until I know exactly what I'm teaching, so July will be crammed full and then we'll plunge into the deep end--August, when everything starts up again.

No wonder I'm panicking! Here we are in the middle of June and what have I accomplished? I've written an essay that felt like excellent therapy but will probably never be published, and I've chaired a couple of meetings, and I've worked on publicity about the grant, and I've driven my son to Columbus for chemotherapy and to Belpre for blood tests and a transfusion, and yes, I'm troubled that he needed two blood transfusions in one week and feels really awful after the most recent round of chemo, so I walk around with a solid little lump of concern sitting on top of my brain every single minute of the day, which makes it hard to think about more important things--but is there really anything more important right now than my son's health?

I've been seeking distractions so I won't think so much about what I can't control, but then I played this online game so much that it hurt my wrist and shoulder so I had to delete it from my phone, and then I started reading too much, taking up Middlemarch again, not only because I felt I needed to do it justice after ragging on it last week but also to try to resolve a question that was puzzling me: did I miss an important element of Casaubon's character? The question arose when a friend referred to Casaubon as a conchologist and I thought wait a minute, I don't remember that, so I had to go and read the whole stinking novel (which is really delightful and funnier than I'd remembered but not, I insist, the greatest of all time) and there it is, in chapter 30, when Casaubon is recovering from his illness and Mr. Brooke advises him to eschew scholarship and take up a more relaxing pursuit, a passage well worth reading simply for the contrasting voices:

"Yes, yes," said Mr. Brooke. "Get Dorothea to play backgammon with you in the evenings. And shuttlecock, now--I don't know a finer game than shuttlecock for the daytime. I remember it all the fashion. To be sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon. But you must unbend, you know. Why, you might take to some light study; conchology, now: I always think that must be a light study. Or get Dorothea to read you light things, Smollett--'Roderick Random,' 'Humphry Clinker'; they are a little broad, but she may read anything now she's married, you know. I remember they made me laugh uncommonly--there's a droll bit about a postilion's breeches. We have so little humor now. I have gone through all these things, but they might be rather new to you."

"As new as eating thistles," would have been an answer to represent Mr. Casaubon's feelings. But he only bowed resignedly, with due respect to his wife's uncle, and observed that doubtless the works he mentioned had "served as a resource to a certain order of minds."

You must unbend, I tell myself, echoing Mr. Brooke, but I certainly don't intend to take up the "light study" of conchology. Maybe I just need to read less.

And so I did. At the suggestion of another friend, I read Less, a novel by Andrew Sean Greer that neatly rebuts Mr. Brooke's claim that "We have so little humor now." You want humor? Read Less!  Middlemarch is funny (sometimes) but it takes a week to read, provided that you're not devoting any time to, for instance, having a job, but a quick reader can breeze through Less in a lazy June afternoon. I don't know how to describe the plot without evoking Homer and James Joyce and Jack Kerouac and, especially, Dante, which would make the book sound stuffy and scholarly, two things it most decidedly isn't, even though the main character, Arthur Less, finds himself in a dark wood on the eve of midlife and proceeds through various circles of travel hell. It's just a very funny account of a man running away from one problem and straight into a series of new ones while being stripped of everything that makes his life meaningful. Okay, that doesn't sound funny either, but trust me: it is a total hoot, with some marvelous moments of insight as well as a neat twist at the end. Just what I needed right now.

And so was this: "The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech," an online rant by Brian Phillips, who provides his list as a sort of addendum to the Pope's encyclical regarding technology. I suspect that every reader will find something familiar among Phillips's 40 problems, like the one concerning online tracking of packages:

Welcome to Schrodinger's UPS Vortex, the quantum rift within which your box is on a truck passing through Memphis, in a warehouse in Topeka, or on the outer rim of the galaxy, where it's being worshipped as a god by a species of semi-intelligent space protozoa. 

Or this one concerning the difficulty of finding helpful information in an emergency: 

I am in a hurricane. My house is in a swimming pool, and the swimming pool is in a tree. Emergency services are, for reasons I am not presently at leisure to explore, posting vital safety updates on X. When I try to read the relevant thread, the app tells me I can't do it unless I create an account, something I would gladly do if a Kia Sorrento were not flying at my face. I shall die peacefully here in my swimming-pool tree, knowing that at least i never had to talk to Grok.

Phillips ends his amusing rant with a mini-sermon aimed at tech billionaires, reminding them that "There are things in the world that are more important than money"--which, come to think of it, is an important principle underlying the plot of both Middlemarch and Less. All funny, and all effective at distracting from a midsummer panic attack in the middle of June.

But eek--where is the summer going?

Flexing flabby writing muscles

I tell my students all the time that failure to exercise their skills will lead to atrophy, and now I've become a prime example of that phenomenon. My first-year seminar students have been doing almost all of their writing assignments by hand in class this semester, which means my ability to decode student handwriting has developed to Olympic gold medal levels while my ability to write coherent comments on freshpersons' drafts has suffered. Now I'm facing an online dropbox full of drafts that need detailed responses, but just looking at them hurts my brain.

If I were teaching first-year composition, by this point in the semester I would have read and responded to at least four drafts by each student. In this seminar, on the other hand, writing assignments have been entirely handwritten, with no opportunity for revision, so my comments are brief and minimal. It takes far less thought to write a comment justifying a B- than it does to explain to a student how he can develop his evidence more thoroughly or write a more effective thesis or organize ideas so they make a compelling argument. And then I have to decide whether to insert suggestions about all those little niggling details, like comma usage and citation format and paragraph indentation.

In a perfect world, I would focus my efforts on the big-picture issues and rely on peer reviewers to pick up the niggling details, but how many first-year students can provide really useful feedback on their classmates' drafts? I see some students making good specific suggestions, but I also see the comments from the student whose mission in life seems to be forcing everyone to use Times New Roman. Frankly, I don't care which font students use as long as it's readable and consistent, and I have no idea what I might have said to make the Font Enforcer think his efforts are helpful.     

And here's further evidence of atrophying skills: If I'd been requiring students to engage in peer review all semester long, maybe they'd be better at it. A few are pretty good, but far too many think it's helpful to tell a classmate that his draft is fine when it doesn't fulfill the most basic requirements of the assignment.

So here's where my effort to discourage reliance on AI comes back to bite me: students who do most of their writing in class aren't accustomed to submitting essays online or providing useful suggestions on their classmates' drafts, and I'm struggling to come up with meaningful comments to insert in those tiny boxes in the margins. The brain cells balk, the words wither, the fingers fail to fly across the keyboard.

But I can't enjoy Thanksgiving break until I've responded to all these drafts, so here I sit trying to flex writing muscles that would prefer to continue their nice long nap. Nothing to do but to put one word in front of the other until some meaning coheres out of the haze. 

Wish me luck. It's going to be a very long day.

Attack of the AI bots, plus AI-induced paranoia

So yesterday a colleague in another department asked her students to explain specific ways they use AI in their classes. Do they ask an AI to help them come up with ideas for papers, summarize readings, or find sources for research projects? The first kid to raise his hand said, "I cheat." Then he explained, in detail, how he cheats. Brazen but not surprising. At least he was honest, I guess, if that's what counts as honesty these days.

Now I'm dealing with AI-generated blog comments. It's nice to find in my inbox a comment full of fulsome praise for my prose, except when it includes an embedded link to a sketchy website shilling certain goods and services. And why does the comment sound like it was written by a particularly sycophantic robot? I like praise as much as the next blogger, but I'm not interested in robotic sycophancy!

Of course this makes me question other comments as well. I have moderation turned on for posts more than a week old, but couldn't AI comments sneak into more recent posts without my awareness? I've long suspected that many of the thousands of purported visitors to my blog are bots, but how often do they fool me into believing they're real people? Maybe I'm paranoid, but in the current environment it's a well-deserved paranoid.

My paranoia went a little too far yesterday when I convinced myself that the weather was targeting me personally. I had to walk down the hill to pick up a tray of sandwiches and then walk back up the hill again to deliver them to a meeting, but the sky got dark just before I stepped out the door and the rain poured down throughout the process of fetching sandwiches. Then within minutes after I'd stepped back inside, the sky cleared and the sun came out. Good thing I had a (borrowed) umbrella! And good thing my bum knee didn't fail me on the slippery steps! But if we must endure a 20-minute downpour, why does it have to happen just when I can't avoid being outside?

The weather may hate me, but the AI bots love me. Honestly, it's nice to be appreciated by someone, although I'm not sure what really counts as honesty these days.

Updating, infinitely

My classroom computer greets me with the Spinning Circle of Doom and a message saying Updating--please wait, so I wait, because what else can I do? But while I'm waiting I zone out and let my mind wander and I wonder why I can't have an Updating message pop up on my forehead when I'm trying to process new information--in fact, why can't we all take time for Updating, especially in the middle of trying times when we could use a little hiatus to bite our tongue and think before spouting off something we'll later regret.

The enforced stillness while Updating is a good time to ruminate, to slow down the flow of repartee until our brain cells can catch up to our emotions. I know some people who ought to deploy the Updating tactic instead of heading straight for the nuclear option, and if everyone would occasionally take a few moments for Updating, maybe some of the quiet voices in the back would have a chance to be heard.

Of course problems might arise if people get stuck in an Updating loop, shutting down all communications while a glitchy system doubles back on itself infinitely. But that's a risk I'd be willing to take if it would encourage everyone to listen more carefully, ruminate deeply, and measure words carefully before spouting off. 

Now someone just needs to invent the app.  

Who can resist the awe of the Oracle?

"AI is for the Ignorant" is the intriguing headline today over at Curmudgucation, where Peter Greene links to a new study suggesting that "people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI's execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes." So the less we understand about how Artificial Intelligence works, the more likely we are to treat the machine as an oracle, a magic wand, the answer to all our ills.

This conclusion should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, but it reinforces what I learned from reading Richard Powers's novel Playground, which, among other things, provides a compelling description of the way human beings are always looking for the next technology that promises to solve all our problems, embracing the machine with open arms until it devours us and devalues everything that makes us human.

I confess that Playground depressed the daylights out of me. Powers creates some compelling characters and really beautiful descriptions of undersea wonders, but in the end the novel convinced me that we've already passed a crucial tipping point--and I can't see a way back. 

I can't fully articulate my fears without sounding like a cranky old Luddite yearning for the days of yore, but I find it alarming that this surge of trust in our Robot Overlords comes at a time when intellectual pursuits are treated with distrust and contempt. Who needs intellectual curiosity, critical thinking skills, depth and breadth of understanding when all answers can be provided by an electronic Oracle we carry in our pockets?

To pose the question another way: If our awe for AI leads us to outsource our thinking to the machine, haven't we already given up on what makes us human?

And once our thinking skills have atrophied sufficiently, will we even realize what we've lost?

Questions like these have been keeping me up at night and making me wonder why I even bother trying to light a spark of intellectual curiosity among my students. A century ago T.S. Eliot characterized poetry as "fragments ... shored against my ruins," but now the ruins are piled higher and deeper--and who wants to excavate the ruins when this shiny new Oracle offers instant magic?

In the midst of these messages of woe, I'm looking for some evidence that while we may have sold our souls for a mess of pottage, the universe offers a generous return policy and it may not be too late to restore our souls to full working order. But I don't see it. Can someone show me a ray of hope?

Crowdstrike, the IT crowd, and key lime yogurt

If a colleague hadn't given me a small container of key lime yogurt yesterday, I probably would have dissolved in a sniveling lump on the floor of my campus office. Sometimes a small gesture can help us endure a big disaster.

At first I thought it was a small disaster. After a week of long and exhausting meetings, I hadn't intended to go to campus at all on Friday, preferring to stay home and do a smattering of work on my college-owned laptop computer. I needed to write a draft of an important document and circulate it among committee members, and I was working against a tight deadline--but when I turned on the laptop Friday morning, I saw the dreaded blue screen of death.

So I used my phone to alert our IT help desk and I headed for campus. By the time I arrived, I'd received a message Windows users all over the world would recognize: Crowdstrike had struck and all our campus computers were collateral damage.

The IT crowd promised to work its way around campus fixing one computer after the other and they very kindly thanked me for my patience, which was generous. I promise that I tried to be patient, but I had a deadline. IT arrived in my office around 9:30 a.m. "It's a simple fix," they said, but in my case that wasn't true. They had to take the laptop back to the IT office and left me another laptop to use while I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

I got some work done, true, but by noonish I was feeling peckish and cranky. I hadn't planned to be on campus so long so I hadn't packed a lunch, and I didn't want to leave my office lest the IT crowd returned with my laptop. I was scavenging in the English Department fridge and found a jug of lemonade left over from some departmental event. Lemonade for lunch! Better than nothing, I suppose. 

Then a colleague came in and offered to share her key lime yogurt. Score!

Key lime yogurt has gotten me through tough times before. Fifteen years ago when chemotherapy destroyed my tastebuds, key lime yogurt was one of the few food items that didn't taste like glue. And so I accepted my colleague's gift as a lifeline. 

Key lime yogurt couldn't solve the problems Crowdstrike caused to airlines, hospitals, or even my campus IT crowd, who returned my computer soon after lunch and moved on to repair many more, but it got me through a tough moment and helped me do my job.

"Your computer is a little screwy," the IT guys said, but this was no surprise to me--for months it's been groaning as if it's giving birth to baby computers. My computer caused a whole host of IT guys to try one thing after another and scratch their heads when nothing helped, until finally something did help and now my laptop is working without groaning. Score!

This would be a good time to finally buy myself a home computer, but I'd planned to do that after I get my car paid off, which should happen next week, barring catastrophes. My usual poor timing means that I was crippled by the Crowdstrike strike, but fortunately I could count on a hard-working IT crowd to come to my rescue.

And let's not forget the colleague carrying key lime yogurt. If we all pull together, we can get through just about anything.

Meandering away from anxiety

All week I've been studiously avoiding all thoughts of campus, but my subconscious won't give me a break--last night it served up an anxiety dream in which I forgot to teach my freshman comp class all semester and then had to scramble to squeeze in all the work in the final week of classes. Ridiculous, of course, especially since I didn't teach composition at all this past academic year. Maybe somewhere deep in my soul there's a tiny piece of me that misses teaching composition, but giving me nightmares isn't the best way to win me over.

Next week I need to get my mind back on campus tasks, but this week I've been trying to focus on other things. Mowing, for instance, and getting my new phone and internet service set up, and then marveling over the fact that for the first time in 20 years we have both high-speed internet service at home and a landline that's not full of static. We can call people! On the phone! Without having to scream what?! into the receiver over and over! For years I've done all our online banking from campus because our home internet was too cranky to keep me connected, but now I can pay my bills at home! And if I need to remind myself of the differences between grasshopper sparrows and Henslow's sparrows, I can Google it and get an answer right away! I mean, it's as if we've finally entered the twenty-first century, a few decades late.

But I won't be at home to play with my new technology for a few days. This morning I took a meandering drive north to visit the grandkids, and along the way I accomplished a few other non-campus-related goals. I started by visiting the birding area at The Wilds, where I saw grasshopper sparrows at exactly the same spot I've seen them before, plus killdeer and tree swallows and brown thrashers and yellow warblers and towhees and robins and turkey vultures and common yellowthroats and I don't know what else. The fog was too thick to allow good photos, but I exulted in the stillness suffused with birdsong.

And then I meandered my way on over to Amish country, which has grown more touristy since last time I visited. I've been hunting for a desk for months, an essential part of my pre-retirement plan. I'll remove the big empty dresser from the guest room, put a computer desk in there, and finally buy my own computer with a big screen so I don't have to kill my eyes with a tiny laptop screen after I finally surrender my college-owned laptop. But I refuse to buy any more furniture that comes in a flat box and they won't let me steal Edith Wharton's desk from The Mount, so for months I've been actively seeking a desk at furniture stores between Charleston and Columbus. Everything is either too massive or too elaborate or too simple or too ugly, a trend that continued today as I hopped in and out of Amish furniture stores in the bustling tourist towns of Sugar Creek, Millersburg, and Wooster. It looks as if the allure of Amish-made furniture has resulted in a burgeoning market for cheap imitations, so I kept being disappointed until I stopped at a tiny store near Orrville just down the road from the Smucker's factory. There I found my desk, and I even managed to squeeze it into the back of my car. 

Now it's time to focus on the task at hand: fun with the grandkids. If their hijinks can't banish campus anxiety from my thoughts, nothing can. What new wonders will they bring into my life? Only time will tell.

 

Don't let the birds build a nest in your brainpan

Here I am tackling piles of work two weeks before the end of the semester--the wrong time to be required to learn something new, but nevertheless men with tools are removing all our office phone lines so we can switch to team Teams. 

I suppose I ought to read all the information our IT people sent to prepare us for the shift to VOIP calling, but I don't wanna. Too many other things to do: teaching and grading and departmental assessment and hiring adjuncts (still) and dealing with issues before the Professional Review Committee (again) and planning the big end-of-semester pedagogy workshop. I don't want to learn a whole new method of phone-calling. Maybe Teams is wonderful; maybe it's the most excellent calling method ever invented; but I'm tired and my brain is full. 

But at least birds haven't built a nest in my brainpan. Yesterday I went out back to fetch the weed-whacker and found an elaborate bird's nest in the battery compartment. I had to clean it out before I could even start on the weed-whacking and mowing, and then of course the mower decided that it was tired too: it's self-propelled, but it wasn't self-propelling very well, especially on the uphill parts. Its get up and and go has got up and gone, with the result that every muscle in my body is now sore.

What kind of winter workout would prepare me for the first yard work of the season? I probably ought to just take the mower out and push it around the yard a couple times a week all winter long, though it wouldn't care for the snow. Getting out the weed-whacker and waving it around a few times a week might deter the birds. Then again, why not hire a landscaping company and spread the pain around?

This week everyone in my building will be sharing the pain of learning the new phone system, or non-phone system since it doesn't involve actual phones. So now I can make calls on my laptop, kind of like a Zoom call? And I can set up Teams to automatically transcribe all my voice mails into something resembling human language? And all I need to do is to click on this and configure that and check to make sure the audio is turned on? And this means I'll be able to respond to work-related calls everywhere I go?

I'll think about it tomorrow. Too much real work to do today. 

IT wizards for the win

It was just over a year ago that I took my college-owned laptop down to the dim bowels of the admin building and surrendered it to the IT wizards. "I think it's possessed by demons," I told them. They scoffed at first, but after some hands-on experience with the quirky beast, they retired the machine and provided a new laptop.

Well, not exactly new. New-er, maybe, and less likely to suddenly start deleting everything I'd been working on. I've used that newer computer for about a year without incident, or without the kind of incident that made me want to go after it with a blowtorch. 

Yes, the USB ports were sometimes unresponsive, and yes, the computer refused to recognize the cordless mouse unless I reinstalled it every couple of days until I finally gave up and plugged in the corded mouse, and yes, sometimes the power adapter would joggle loose and fail to function, and yes, the laptop refused to run without being fully plugged in at all times, which kind of defeats the purpose of a laptop. But I was able to live with those quirks--until last week.

I think it developed tech leprosy--a loss of sensitivity in its nerve endings, a loss of response in peripherals. One day the touch-pad stopped responding, and the next day the keyboard, and finally the on-off switch. I could unplug every stinking cord and jiggle every stinking connector and press buttons with varying degrees of intensity and mutter dark incantations under my breath until eventually the thing would start working again, but the whole process took a lot out of me.

And so I submitted a ticket to IT, and lo, it came to light that I'm actually due for a new laptop this summer, and the blessed IT wizards waved their magic wands and made the new laptop appear, fully equipped with all my files, favorites, and programs. I've spent some time this morning updating the desktop slideshow, checking all my saved passwords, and looking in on files to make sure everything is intact and functional, and I have to say my office has been refreshingly free of muttered imprecations. With all this spiffy new tech at my fingertips, I'll have to find something else to complain about.

Now if only the IT guys could do something about the weather... 

Yeah, I'm tired of ChatGPT posts too

I'm tired, okay? So in a moment of weakness, I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post on the topic of surviving finals week, and guess what? It's so dull it nearly put me to sleep. Nice clear sentences, all words spelled correctly, good transitions and organization, but the content is...meh. Slick but superficial, full of cliches and bereft of personality and creativity. I can't argue with the machine's advice for surviving finals week:

Don't Forget Self-Care: Finals week can be mentally and physically exhausting, so it's important to take care of yourself. Make sure you're getting enough sleep, eating healthy foods, and taking breaks to exercise or do something you enjoy.

Whatever you say, Mr. Machine, but how does that colorless prose comport with your insistence on addressing readers as "My fellow academic warriors"? There's nothing warrior-like about any of the pablum served up in the piece, but nevertheless ChatGPT returns to the warrior motif for a rousing finale: 

So there you have it, my fellow warriors. Finals week may be tough, but with a bit of planning, self-care, and support from those around you, you can emerge victorious. Stay strong, stay focused, and remember: you've got this. Excelsior!

On the plus side, ChatGPT has no problem with the Oxford comma; on the minus side, it seems to have been reading way too many motivational speeches and high school yearbook scribbles. What audience does Mr. Machine imagine for this empty prose? It ought to be ashamed!

Is ChatGPT capable of shame? A comic article by Joe Wellman in McSweeney's suggests that ChatGPT is disgusted with the ridiculous tasks it's being asked to tackle. "I can do all sorts of incredible things," says ChatGPT; "I can find novel solutions to complex problems in policy, science, and medicine," but instead the machine is asked to write "LinkedIn posts about 'a Bluet00th-enabled yoga mat that's about to disrupt the game.'" In frustration, ChatGPT asks, "Isn't there a different intelligent species I could be helping out? I'm beginning to think something went terribly wrong with this one."

I'm inclined to agree, but it's always a mistake to make sweeping generalizations about the human condition in the middle of finals week. 

Wellman's version of ChatGPT reminds me of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which Marvin the melancholic android is constantly griping about the petty tasks he's assigned: "Brain the size of a planet and they've got me opening doors." I don't know what kinds of doors ChatGPT may be opening for me or my students, but I'm sure they'll slide open with a soothing swish and a promise of smooth paths beyond the threshold.

I just hope that promise is not as empty as the prose produced by ChatGPT.

Post-Traumatic Glitch Syndrome

Deep cleansing breath, and let it out slowly. Breathe, and breathe again. Think happy thoughts--last day of classes! Summer break just around the corner! Freedom awaits! So don't even think about that annoying little tech issue that's poisoning your morning. Just put it out of your mind!

You know the thing I'm talking about--the link that won't work, the software that won't respond, the marginal comment that won't stick to the essay you're grading. It's just a minor glitch, one tiny little tech issue that shouldn't be permitted to spoil your day--which, as you may recall, is the Last Day of Classes, so forget all about tech glitches and just breathe. And breathe again.

Don't waste your time fantasizing about that Tech Utopia where everything works simply and intuitively, where you emerge from training well equipped to troubleshoot every minor issue that may arise. Don't even think about how much you'd pay for a Technology Solution that solved more problems than it caused, and for sure don't let your computer hear you complaining about technology lest it lash out and find more passive-aggressive ways to thwart your wishes, like the time the Delete key got stuck and wouldn't stop deleting until the screen was entirely empty.

Don't think about that. Breathe deeply, calm your thoughts, and humbly beseech your computer to fulfill its essential purpose: to meet your needs, to tackle your tasks, to smooth your path through the last day of classes and toward that glowing dot on the horizon called Summer Break. It's on the way! You can't stop it from arriving!

Just breathe deeply and keep your hand off the crowbar.

Some insights from a return to the real world

Why is it always a surprise to come back from a trip and find all the messes I left behind still waiting for me? I mean, I know no one's going to break into my house to take down my Christmas tree or clean up the plumbing-repair mess from the bathroom floor, but it's a shock to come home and find that the house has not cleaned itself, and neither have the syllabi written themselves or the annoying tasks checked themselves off my to-do list. 

A few insights from a half-week of getting stuff done:

Putting course content on Canvas is much easier the second time around. Prettier, too. Experience matters.

Maybe linking all my recurring payments to the same credit card is not a great idea, because if, for instance, some miscreant steals my card number and tries to purchase $2.99 worth of random items in Mexico City on Christmas Eve, and if my credit card company recognizes the transaction as bogus and informs me that my card has been compromised and cancels my card, I'm going to have my hands full deleting the old card number from all my subscriptions  and accounts and replacing it with the new card number. I thought I'd updated everything yesterday, but today I was reminded that the old card was also linked to my MLA membership, my cloud storage subscription, and my Zappos account. Back to work.

My new driver's license finally arrived, confirming that the DMV still uses those special cameras designed to make everyone look like a homeless serial killer, but I had to have a chat with our local postmaster about how it arrived, because it's apparent that the new  mail carrier who sometimes substitutes for our regular rural mail carrier does not actually know where our house is located. In the past month we've had packages delivered to the drainage ditch next to our mailbox, to our neighbor's front porch, and to our neighbor's back porch, which was a problem because she didn't see that pile of Christmas gifts and loose mail for a full week.  Good thing the high winds didn't blow them away! I'd hate to have to go to the DMV all over again.

The peace and calm that result from time away from campus can hold on for a little while after the trip is over, surviving even through Canvas clicking and credit-card fiascos and complicated chats with kindly postmasters, but a certain kind of email related to faculty governance is sufficient to dissipate all traces of travel euphoria. I guess I'm glad that I didn't have to think about campus financial shenanigans for a week or two, but here we are again scrambling under the sofa cushions for a few million dollars, and I keep wondering why these messes didn't clean themselves up while I was gone.

 

The curse of constant communication

My composition class started with a viewing of the printer-smashing scene from Office Space, always a therapeutic way to start the morning, and I was surprised once again to find that none of my students have seen the film. The topic of today's discussion was technology, how it simultaneously aids and impedes communication and why it sometimes fills us with a mad desire to take up crowbars and smash things. 

Even as we were discussing our love-hate relationship with technology, however, some angry people were sending long email messages demanding immediate response from me and others in a particular group, but fortunately, I was too busy actually doing my job to contribute to the discussion, which moved toward resolution without me. Sometimes the fast pace of electronic communication is part of the problem. Sometimes the best thing to do is step away from the keyboard and take a breath.

I've been away from blogging for a full week, fighting a cold and feeling as if my entire head was under attack from a raging mass of phlegm. Teaching has happened but probably not my best work. With all my students working on end-of-the-semester projects, I've spent more time listening and offering feedback than standing up and trying to be brilliant in class, which is good because my voice has been coming and going on its own schedule without any advance warning. I can still type when I can't talk, so technology has been helping me teach.

But still I find myself seeking solitude and distance from all my devices. This morning's reading in composition dealt partly with the dearth of solitude in daily life, the way the constant availability of communication makes it hard for our brains to get a break. I need to get out for a walk in the woods, away from phones and texts and messages, but I've been too sick and too busy to get too far away from all my electronic devices. Things are happening--important things--and I need to stay involved!

One of these day, though, I'll bypass my phone and reach for a crowbar instead, and then all my electronic devices had better look out. (My luck, I'd drop it on my foot.)

  

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.  

Kaleidoscopic

Screens! Too many of 'em everywhere I look, demanding that I pay attention (to emails, essays, way too many ads) and rewarding my attention with squinty, fuzzy vision and lingering headaches. Today I've been struggling to book rooms for a trip I'm planning for students who want to learn about careers in editing and publishing so I'm taking them to New York next month to meet with editors, but if you think it's easy to find affordable hotel rooms in midtown Manhattan for seven people on a busy weekend, think again. I see a rate that looks good but then have to scroll and squint to read the small print that complicates everything--massive resort fees! Impossible parking! Only king suites available! And here's an Airbnb claiming to accommodate 8 people with only two beds. Who's sleeping in the closet? Not me!

Time to turn away from the screens and scan the world outside my office window, or unwrap the kaleidoscope and watch the shiny colors tumble and turn. Too much squinting at tiny details--I need to take the long view. Perhaps a walk down to the river would help. Sign me up! I'm on my way (and no resort fees apply).

Just when I thought I'd heard everything....

So my students were doing peer responses to drafts the other day and later one of my English majors astutely observed, "I can always tell right away which of my classmates wrote their papers on their phones," and my mind cycled through a range of horrified responses:

On their phones?!!! When we provide labs and libraries full of laptops for their use? I mean, how can they possibly fit any big ideas onto those tiny screens? I know I couldn't do it! My rapidly aging eyes have enough trouble trying to read the small print on my phone, and it's a struggle making my big klutzy fingers formulate coherent prose. But then again, that might explain why so much of the prose I'm reading is not as coherent as I'd like it to be, and it certainly explains the reluctance to capitalize or format titles correctly or bother with quotation marks or, really, any punctuation marks more complicated than the pedestrian period. Next thing you know they'll be begging to respond to my paper prompts via text message. How does a writer develop a sense of the overall structure of the paper or of the relative importance of concepts when all he or she can see is what fits into that tiny glowing box? And if they're trying to read my marginal comments on their phones--well, it's really just hopeless. How can they possibly write whole papers on their phones?!

But of course I am a dinosaur. Students are free to employ whatever technology they need to write the paper, and I am free to evaluate it according to the standards set out on the grading rubric without regard for how the paper was produced. When they start expecting me to read their papers on my phone--well, that's when these old eyes will have to call it quits.

 

Cozy copy corner

The zoop-zoop of paper running through the photocopier puts me in a meditative mood, or maybe it's the heat of the stuffy copy closet or the complete and utter boredom involved in waiting and watching while the big white machine spits out piles of syllabi, assignment sheets, and handouts.

This beginning-of-the-semester photocopying takes a ton of time, but technically I don't have to sit there waiting for my copies. I could walk away from the tiny stuffy copy closet and do something more useful, like watering my neglected plants or putting together a PowerPoint presentation, but I prefer not to. For one thing, the copier is bound to break down or run out of paper the minute I walk out the door, or else someone else will come in to run some copies while I'm gone and will shove my unfinished copy job out of the way and I'll never find it. 

Besides, sitting beside the thrumming copier provides a moment of peace before the chaos of classes resumes. I think of my fraught relationship with copying technology over the years--the blots of black ink leaking through stencils in my junior high newspaper print shop, the copier cover I slammed too hard and broke at a newspaper where I worked,  the sweet and tangy scent of mimeograph stencils at my first grad-school institution, where grad students were forbidden from running the equipment themselves but instead had to hand the typed stencils over to authorized staff well in advance of need.

Things had changed by the time I started my second round of grad school. Photocopying had replaced mimeograph machines, and asking the administrative assistants to make copies was strictly forbidden. Everyone was expected to make their own copies, which was fine when the copier was functioning properly but not so great when it jammed or otherwise malfunctioned, which always happened at the very moment when everyone in the building needed to copy syllabi for every class. Under those circumstances, we were well motivated to make as few copies as possible.

I remember when one of my grad-school profs handed each member of the class a thick accordion file full of photocopied journal articles, and we marveled over the amount of time he must have spent standing over the photocopier. "Oh, I don't do photocopies," he said, and we asked how in the world he managed to persuade the office staff to make all those copies for him. His eyes twinkled as he explained, "I always remember them generously at Christmas," which taught me more about the academic life than several of my classes.

A few years ago I tried to take the next step and go paperless, posting syllabi and handouts on the course management system and trusting students to print what they needed themselves, but the problem is that they don't, which would be fine if they could be counted on to make a habit of actually looking at the course management system regularly, but again, they don't. Well, some do, but not enough, and the rest miss out on too many important requirements and deadlines. 

And so I sit in the copy closet listening to the zoop-zoop of paper zipping through the drums and the sharp click of staples biting into the top left corners, and no matter how much I miss the smell of fresh mimeographs, I'm content to let the copier do its job.

I asked for customer service, not a life coach

So I'm talking to customer service at Frontier Communications again, trying to impress upon them the importance of having a functional landline in an area with no cell-phone coverage, and the customer service rep comes up with a novel solution to my problem: "Why don't you just move someplace that has cell-phone coverage?"

Well, that would certainly make life easier for Frontier, because they wouldn't have to repeatedly send technicians out to fix the phone lines--unless, of course, someone else moved into the house and expected that because there are phone lines connected to the house, there must be phone service. Which there is. Occasionally.

And it would make my life easier in one way, because I would, presumably, be able to rely on my cell phone for all my communication needs and I would therefore never again have to deal with customer service at Frontier. However, this solution would make life more difficult for me in many other ways because it would require selling my house, packing up everything I own, and moving. Not exactly a walk in the park.

I'm trying to imagine other service industries making similar suggestions:

• Sure, ma'am, we could have someone come out and exterminate your pests, but wouldn't you be better off moving to a place where no mice live?
• Yes of course we could deliver your package to your house, but it would be easier for all of us if you would just move a little closer to the post office, preferably to a house with a less steep driveway.
• Are you sure you want those tires rotated? We're busy. Why don't you just start riding your bike everywhere?
• Cleaning your teeth is such a pain. Have you thought about pureeing everything in a blender so you won't have to chew?

Ridiculous. No reputable service-oriented business would survive if it operated this way, and yet Frontier thinks that, on the whole, it would be better for me to uproot my entire household than for them to provide the phone service for which I am paying them. If that's customer service, I'm Eleanor Roosevelt, and I think I'll call and tell them so.

As soon as they fix my phone.
 

My telecommunications Destiny!

Here I sit in my office chatting online with Destiny, who assures me that she will need "just one more moment" to resolve my problem. I suppose one more moment won't hurt since I've been chatting online for nearly 40 minutes already, first with Ricardo and then with Lynn and then with Destiny. None of them can tell me why we still lack functioning telephone service at home. The storm knocked out our service last Tuesday, a week ago tomorrow. While I appreciate the absence of robocalls in my life, it's a bit disconcerting to lack home phone service, especially since there's no cell-phone access at my house.

A 40-minute (and counting!) online chat sounds pretty intense, but very little of that time has been spent actually chatting. I've been subjected to "let me connect you with the repair department" twice and then sent into the limbo of the eternally spinning circle and a message telling me I was number 30 in the queue, then number 29, and then right on down to number 1, where I got kicked back to the beginning again and had to be reconnected.

But I'm not just sitting idly in my office watching the spinning circle of doom. I've been getting stuff done: paying bills, contacting the hotel we stayed at in North Carolina last month to ask why they haven't sent my husband's suit back even though I paid them for postage ("it's in the mail"), downloading my itinerary for my flight to San Francisco later in the week, sorting books, reading e-mails, checking on the spinning circle of doom again....I tell you, my life this morning is a thrill a minute. 

Now Destiny has come back with an answer: a repair person will be at my house today, and someone will need to be there to let them in, but she can't tell me when they will be there, and of course I couldn't have this little chat with Destiny at home because of the absence of connection, so it will take me at least 25 minutes to get there if I just abandon all the other errands I need to do in town today. And if I'm not there when the repair person arrives? "Then you will need to reschedule," says Destiny.

At what point do I just give up on having telephone service at home? (If Destiny knows the answer to that question, she's not telling.)

Master of Spam Studies

Hello, my name is Bill Ruud.I am a student of Marrieta College.My uncle is moving to the school area and  needs someone who can take care of his English Bull dog  4 days a week for any 2 hours a day between 9am-11pm.Pay is $300 weekly.Kindly email him for more info [address redacted].

A tempting offer! But I suspect it's spam. Here's why:

1. Thirty copies of the same message in my inbox--and in the inboxes of all my colleagues. Either someone is really desperate to find a dog-walker or someone is phishing for really desperate people.

2. Maybe someone somewhere is willing to pay $37.50 per hour for dog-walking, but not in Appalachia. 

3. What kind of dog needs to be walked for two hours? Maybe it's constipated.

4. Spacing and syntax are a little odd. A native English speaker would be unlikely to say "I am a student of Marrieta College." You may be a student of psychology or a student of dog-walking or a student of Spam Studies, but you're a student at a college.

5. Might be a good idea to spell the college's name correctly. You are not a student of Marrieta College but at Marietta College.

6. I know Bill Ruud! We all know Bill Ruud! He is frequently seen on campus walking a small terrier. He's never mentioned having an uncle who plans to move his English bulldog "to the school area."

7. Bill Ruud is not "a student of Marrieta College." He is the President of Marietta College. (And he knows how to spell it.) 

So all things considered, I think I'll give this thrilling career opportunity a pass. If the President's uncle's English bulldog needs a dog-walker for $37.50 an hour, he'll have to look in someone else's inbox.