Yesterday was a day that started out strangely, and only got more strange as the day went on. No, seriously. It may have been one of the top five strangest days of my entire teaching career, and that's saying something. I've had some pretty weird days in my time.
It all started when I got to the main campus. Everything before that was normal. I stopped to get gas this morning, I put the fuel cleaner in the tank with the gas, and drove south. My first class, on West campus, was fine -- I taught my students, I drove over to main campus, parked and took the shuttle down to my building, and went upstairs to the department as per the usual.
There's this saying that if something weird or strange is going to happen at the university, it's going to somehow tie back to, or otherwise start in, the Department of English. It's a long-held belief by those of us who have been there long enough to have seen a lot of weird shit happen over the years, and it's mostly unexplained. Stuff just happens up there, or gets started up there, that most people would define as extremely odd -- and I'm fairly sure it doesn't happen in most other departments at most other universities.
I got off the elevator to see my office door open. Hm, I thought, I guess my officemate is in today. Mind you, my officemate is never in the office at the same time I am. I haven't even seen him since the first day of the semester in January, and one of his students dropped off a paper when I was in the office on March 4th. I left a note on said paper saying when said student had dropped it off, and left it on his desk. It has remained in the same spot on his desk, with the same note on it, since that day. This tells me he's not been in the office at all this month.
I wouldn't know, though, as I'm only there one day per week.
Anyway. So my door was open about halfway or so. As I approached my office, I saw that, well, my laptop and coffee pot were still there, so it's not like anyone had broken in to steal my stuff. I opened the door the rest of the way and ran into something hard -- it was a man, on a ladder, halfway in my ceiling and half below, running wires into the room.
Ooookay.
I apologized, put my bag down, and ventured down to the main office, where I asked our administrator something to the effect of "Do you know why there's a man hanging halfway out of my office's ceiling?"
"He's installing the spy cameras," she said, smirking. "No, they're finally fixing the internet in your office -- they're running new cables and putting in another jack."
The wall port for ethernet in my office has never worked for the past almost-year I've been in that office. The port is completely dead/fried and gives no internet on any of the computers in there. As we were all just given fancy new Dell all-in-one desktop machines at the beginning of the semester, this has been a problem -- those machines have basically been paperweights ever since they were put in our office. My laptop has wifi (it's not that old), but I've never been able to access the secure campus network with it no matter what I do, even though I've followed all of the directions for manual setup and am making sure everything is running the way it's supposed to be. So, for network access from my office, I've been forced to use the school's guest network, which is incredibly shitty and unreliable, barely gives me any signal at all, and frequently kicks me off. In my old office, I just jacked the laptop into the ethernet port on the wall and always had always-on, lightning-fast speed with no issue whatsoever.
"Oh, good," I said. And I stayed out of the guy's way while he worked, which meant doing a fair amount of my work outside the office for a while.
It didn't really matter, as I had some errands to run anyway -- for one, I had the wedding invitations I had to give out to everyone in the department who was there, and I had to make sure they were put in the mailboxes of everyone I wouldn't see yesterday, and handed personally to those folks I would or did see.
Upon going to my colleague's office next door to give him his invitation, he asked me "Want to see something interesting? Look what I pulled off of the bulletin board in the engineering building this morning." And he handed me a flyer with those little pull-tabs on the bottom for phone numbers and email addresses.
It was quite possibly the most...disconcerting flyer I've seen the entire time I've been in academia -- both as a student and as a professor.
This flyer advertised a paper-writing service -- $10 per page, you pick the subject matter, citation style, and required length/grade level, and the people who run this certain website will write your papers for you.
As a professor, the very concept of this "service" angers me greatly. I was even more angered when I went to the website and read the FAQ page, which said this:
"increasingly unaware of individual student needs"? Boo fucking hoo. You're not a special little snowflake, you don't need or deserve individual attention because of who you are. You're a student at a university. You have a job, and that job is to be a student who does their own work and/or succeeds (or fails) on their own merits -- and if you can't succeed on your own merits, skills, and knowledge gained while you're a student, perhaps you shouldn't be a student in the first place. We'll always need people to run checkout counters at grocery stores or make our Arby's roast beef sandwiches and curly fries. That may sound harsh, but I've been battle-hardened by being a teacher for several years now.
Also, "general laziness on the part of educators"? I bust my ass for my students and for my job in general -- I work long hours, I assign and grade up to and including 300 papers and exams every semester (at least four papers for each class of students I teach, if it's full; my 011 class has six papers, and my 210 class has seven, so by rough estimate, this semester alone, even with classes that aren't completely full, I'm grading 250+). I stay up late answering questions in emails from students. I create intricate lesson plans that, yes, are all made available on Blackboard in PDF format so that if my students miss something, they can go get it and read it for themselves. I give my students the benefit of the doubt, and I am as helpful and compassionate in their learning as I can possibly be. I take, as you may know, great pride in my job. Have I had professors in the past, especially as an undergraduate, who didn't put this much effort into their classes for their students? Yes, of course I have. I have always wanted to be the professor that cared more, that did more, that truly wanted to see his students succeed. But I want to see them succeed honestly.
So, "services" like this irk me, in short.
We made copies of the flyers and distributed them to the heads of the programs within the department -- I made sure everyone in charge of the various composition programs was aware of this site and its service, and to be on the lookout for papers coming in from their students that were much better and/or different than what said students have produced in the past. The Director of the Writing Center made a copy of the flyer, along with a printout of some of the pages on the website, and sent it over to the engineering school dean as a memo that these flyers were being posted in their building.
Overreaction? Possibly. But what concerned us the most is that the website advertised that papers could be written for any level -- high school all the way up through Master's and PhD-level theses and dissertations. You get a student who has no clue what he/she is doing but has a lot of money, and they could coast through college or a graduate program without learning anything at all, paying their way through papers, theses, and dissertations to get a degree that they haven't earned and have no clue how to use...that's a big, big problem.
"The problem here is that, well..." I said to the Writing Center director, "that's probably not the only flyer that's been posted on this campus. There are probably hundreds of them scattered around the bulletin boards and signposts. And students will see them and use them."
Upon telling this story to Daisy last night, she said, "You know, there are probably hundreds of websites just like this one."
"Yes," I replied, "but this one is advertising on our campus. Which means that someone affiliated with it, somehow -- whether it's one of their writers or otherwise -- is working on this campus somewhere."
"Well, how hard could it be to figure out who's putting up the flyers?" she asked. "Don't you have security cameras on campus?"
"Psh," I said, "shit no. We have cameras in the parking lots, but that's about it. We're a third-tier university in this state. They can't even afford to pay me a living wage; do you think they can afford security cameras?"
I think I make a pretty valid point here.
Anyway.
Once the flyers were dealt with and there was no longer a man hanging out of the ceiling in my office, the day got even weirder. I checked my mailbox in the department to find an envelope, mailed to me at the university's address, that looked like a bill.
Mind you, I don't get mail at the university. Occasionally I'll get a textbook catalog or a pamphlet or something mailed to me, as I am a professor there, of course -- but I don't get mail there. And I certainly don't get bills there.
I opened it up, and it was a bill. For $400.00. Addressed to me, from a company handling membership dues for the university's chapter of a fraternity -- a fraternity that, of course, I've never heard of, have never applied to be a member of, and have never wanted to be a member of. The bill was for Spring 2014 membership dues, for the first half of the semester. What?
This, needless to say, was odd.
I took it to the Director and asked if he'd ever seen anything like this before. He looked at it, eyeballed it for a few minutes, and concluded that no, he hadn't -- but it sounded like it could possibly be a phishing scheme, where someone who looks like a legit company is randomly sending bills to people for fraternity dues to see if they'll pay them, thinking it slipped their mind.
"I thought it could be something like that too," I said, "because otherwise, why would they mail this to me at school instead of at home? I've never gotten any real mail here on campus that wasn't campus-oriented, and certainly no bills for things I've never requested and have never heard of."
"Especially since you're no longer a student," he said.
His suggestion was that I take it to our new department chair -- a nice lady who I never had for class, but has been at the university for many years and is the guru of the Master's program. Truth be told, I'd only had a small handful of only two-or-three-line conversations with the woman in the almost five years I've been in the department; she doesn't really know me very well at all. Well, now's as good a time as any to get somewhat acquainted, right?
We sat down in her office and I explained the situation. She also thought it could be some sort of phishing scam, despite the fact that it looked really legit (the bill looked nicer than my actual bills I get every month for utilities or credit cards, and included a lot of official information with it). She decided to take it to the next level.
"I think we should call the campus police and report this as a possible phishing scheme," she said.
"Okay," I said, shrugging.
At this point I really didn't know what to make of things, or make of the day itself overall. I'd already dealt with the whole "we'll write your papers for $10 a page" flyer and website, and I still had to spend the remainder of my afternoon and early evening grading through papers and making lesson plans for my night class. I really didn't have the time or patience for this sort of frustration or problem.
She had a brief conversation with one of the campus police officers on the phone, and they said they'd send someone over to look at it/talk about it. I thanked her, and told her I'd keep her posted on what I found out.
In the meantime, I went back to my office. The company who had sent the bill on behalf of the university's fraternity organization was a company called Omega Fi, whose only business is processing transactions and payments for fraternities/sororities nationwide. They're a big company. So I did some research on them -- I went to their website and I did some detective work to see if anyone else had gotten anything questionable or otherwise along these lines that could be deemed as "scam-worthy."
The Omega Fi website is Better Business Bureau certified with a 100% good rating. And there wasn't a single scam report or complaint about them anywhere I could find on the web. Like it or not, it looked like this $400 bill to me, for a service/fraternity I was never and had never been a member of, was completely legit.
You've got to be shitting me, I thought. There's no way -- NO WAY -- I'm paying a $400 bill for nothing, and no way this is right.
Frustrated, I looked through the other papers included with the bill, including a letter that told me about why I was getting it...from the fraternity itself. At the bottom of this letter, I noticed something that I'd overlooked before -- a small, one-line statement that said "Like us on Facebook!" and gave the link to our university's chapter of the fraternity on Facebook.
Okay, I thought. Barring anything else, I can get on there and see if they have contact info at the university or a room/building number so I can go over there and sort this out.
Since I now had lightning-fast, reliable internet access in my office again, that's what I did -- I went right to the fraternity chapter's Facebook page for our university. And here's where it got really weird.
The very first post on the page at the top -- the VERY FIRST -- said something along the lines of "We'd like to welcome [my name] to our fraternity as our newest member -- he's an outgoing, fun-loving guy who we're sure will be a great new fraternity brother."
What the shit?
It included a picture. That picture was a guy, yes. But that guy was not me.
Aha.
I took the entire bill down to the office, where the administrator was. The administrator has access to school records.
"Type my name into the directory," I said, "and do a search."
"What for?" she asked, looking at me like I was an idiot.
"You'll see."
She did.
"How many names pop up?" I asked.
"Two," she said, surprised.
"I knew it," I said, and explained the situation to her, showing her the bill and the like.
There are two of us at the university with the exact same name -- me, the professor who's been here for almost five years now, and this kid, who is a brand-new, incoming freshman starting this year. We have different middle names/initials, but that's it. He joined a fraternity this semester. I looked at the bill again, specifically the mailing address -- it was sent to the university, but simply to the university's main address. Guess who the university has on file for that main address when they look up a name/department? Me, the professor who has been here for years, not this kid. So it was sorted and shipped over to the Department of English, where his fraternity bill arrived in my mailbox.
I had the administrator pull off his mailing address -- his permanent, home address -- and write it down for me. I don't have access to that database as a simple lecturer/professor unless it's for one of my own students. When that was done, I wrote him a letter saying something along the lines of "Congratulations! You're not alone at this university, for we share the same name. Unfortunately, this also means that I was sent your fraternity bill for the spring. I'd change my billing/mailing address if I were you when you pay it. Hope this finds you well, and sorry to be the bearer of a bill." Signed, my name, Academic Lecturer, Department of English, etc. And I stuck it in the outgoing mail box.
For fuck's sake, right?
Looking back on it now, it shouldn't have taken Sherlockian detective work to figure this all out, but still. Let me tell you, for a guy that's barely making ends meet as it is, seeing a $400 bill appear in my mailbox out of the blue with no real explanation is pretty troubling. I'm lucky I did research and looked into it more deeply; my first instinct was that it was some sort of bullshit phishing scheme, and I almost shredded it in the copy room. The only reason I didn't is because I'm already in enough debt from my own credit cards and student loans that I didn't want one more thing to add to that if it was a legitimate mistake. Mistake or not, even if the bill were truly issued to me, even in error, it would still affect my credit score and the like if it went unpaid. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about that. Whether the kid pays his fraternity dues or not is on him, not me.
So. I updated the department chair and the director on the situation, and called the university police to cancel the report and to explain to them everything about what had happened as well. They found it somewhat amusing, to be honest, and the police station guy on the phone was very nice and friendly about it. And so that was that.
Because I'd dealt with that all day, though, I was mentally exhausted, it was close to 4PM, and if I didn't want to be working all day today on student papers for my 102 workshops, I had to force myself to focus on those and get them done, as well as my lesson plans for my 011 class that night, as I'd been too tired on Monday night to formally write them out. I got about halfway done with that stuff before I had to go to class; I did the lesson plans haphazardly, just enough to let me know what I was covering in what order, and got through half of the workshop copies (I did the others earlier this afternoon).
My 011 class, after returning from Spring Break, was a barren wasteland -- I had eight students there...out of nineteen on my roster. Truth be told, I may have fewer on my roster now (some may have dropped), and at least two students have already failed for absences and have been notified of that. I'll have three or four more who fail for absences if they miss next week's class. The students who showed up are the ones who do their work (well, most of them) and are actually doing quite well in the course -- so, again, I know it's not me. I need to talk to the director's wife about this to bring her up to proverbial speed (as she runs the remedial/ESL programs), but she's been really ill as of late, so she's not been on campus when I've been there -- usually she has some of the same office hours I do. If she's ill, I'm guessing she's not checking her email either for the most part, and far be it from me to bug someone when they're sick.
So yes, yesterday was really, really weird. Let's hope the rest of my week isn't that strange.
Oh, and bonus points for anyone who gets the joke/reference in the title of this post as it pertains the the subject matter of said post.
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