Warm-up Time

Spring semester: day thirteen

The university has chosen not to close down for a third day -- which isn't surprising, of course. Classes are, and will be, in session today. In about 90 minutes, I shall leave the house and attempt to safely get to West campus. None of my students have responded to my email, so I assume all of them will be able to get to class -- unless I show up to an empty classroom and twelve emails upon my return home, that is. That would piss me off, especially because I'd be out in the cold and wasting a day's worth of gas driving back and forth for no reason.

As predicted, it is dismally, brutally cold this morning -- 2 degrees above, and feels like -7. While the car has been in the garage since the weekend, it's not like it's much more than about fifteen degrees warmer in there than it is outside, so before I do anything, I'll be sitting in the car for a few minutes in the driveway, trying to get her to warm up a bit before going down the street. If I can make it down the street, that is. I haven't yet heard of anyone else getting stuck or spinning their tires or anything like that, so that's a plus (at least for now, right?) Regardless, I'm giving myself plenty of extra time this morning. The drive to West campus takes about 35 minutes on any given day normally, and if the roads are still bad on several sections of my drive, it will (of course) take me longer today. I have to time things carefully; I don't want to take all sorts of extra time and arrive to campus half an hour before class starts, but I also don't want to get there right at the start time, either, as I've got a lot of stuff to cover today and I need about five or ten minutes of "prep time" in the classroom to get things in order.

The weather forecasters are already mumbling about another possible storm system moving in at almost the same time next week as this week's storm -- Monday night into Tuesday. They don't, however, know if anything's going to come of it yet. Really, I hope nothing does; missing this past Tuesday made my 011 class that much harder, and if I'm forced to miss two weeks in a row because of more snow? It will go from hard to catastrophic. Add in that the end of next week is Valentine's Day, with Daisy coming down on Wednesday night, and another storm system coming in would make everything that much more difficult to navigate through. I'll remind you that this is only the end of the third week of the semester, folks -- it only gets rougher from here on out for me and for my students when it comes to work I, and they, have to do.

I sent an email to the administrator in the department last night about my paycheck stuff, asking her if there was someone I could/should call in the payroll department to get all of my paycheck stuff sorted out or to find out a progress report on things thus far. She responded very kindly and said that she'd check up on it today, and it's possible they called and left a voicemail on her phone at work, and she'd let me know as soon as she heard something. She also let me know that I'm not the only one in this situation -- there's another lecturer (though I don't know who) that's having the same problem right now, and the paperwork and the like to fix it hasn't even been started yet for him/her because they just now found out they weren't in the system. So, really, at least my stuff is in the system now and the fix for my check is in process, which means that I'm not alone and not even the worst off in this situation. I totally feel for the other lecturer, I do. There are maybe ten of us lecturers (or "academic lecturers") within the department teaching classes any given semester. All of us who teach as lecturers do it because we either need to or have to, since the job market for university English instructors is so dismal right now, and it can be (and frequently is) a stressful job with long hours and low pay. It's not like we're all independently wealthy; we have to survive any way we can, so when stuff like this happens, it usually gets fixed really quickly because the department, and the administrators, realize that. We are the second-lowest rung on the chain (the lowest, obviously, being the GTAs) yet we and the GTAs teach the vast majority of the classes the department offers. The vast majority.

Anyway, I'm guessing I'll find something out this afternoon or tomorrow at the latest. I won't be back on main campus until Tuesday anyhow (barring, y'know, a second snowstorm) and Daisy is going to drop some money into my account tomorrow so that I can pay the bills I have now over the weekend...so while it is stressful, yes, I have faith that one way or another it will get resolved fairly soon. It's not pleasant, but it'll be fixed.

Meanwhile, Winter Storm Nika is now hitting my friends and family back home -- it started there last night and will apparently continue through today with freezing rain and ice instead of snow -- it's warmer there than it is here. Some schools there are canceled or delayed as well.

On that note, I am going to get dressed (in multiple layers of warm clothing) and will be leaving the house shortly to attempt my venture down to West campus for the day. Wish me luck, folks.