So, I'm on vacation right now. I am still checking work email about once a day, though, because there was some stuff relating to the yearbook, and so it doesn't pile up too much, and in case there is anything really important that I can deal with remotely. Or things that aren't *that* important, but should be dealt with anyway. Such as this.

I got an email two days ago:

hey miss Miriam this is -Name Redacted- what is everything that is supposed to be in the business plan (sic)

The business plan being a project that was assigned six months ago that was supposed to be REALLY REALLY due July 25th, the last day of fake makeup school before summer recess. I (and other people) have been in contact with Name Redacted, and he knew that this was a graduation requirement and that he needed to finish it and that I wanted it before the 25th so that I could edit it and he could correct it and give me a final version by the end of the day on the 25th. (Or perhaps sometime last week, if he was really late with it.) Furthermore, I don't HAVE a copy of the business plan handout with me: the paper copies are in my office, and the electronic copies are on the share drive, which I can only access from the school network. And while I could take a pretty good stab at listing all the things that are supposed to be there, I'd want to have the paper to refer to before giving a student an Official Pronouncement (and this is not a student whose behavior makes anyone feel inclined to give him extra slack), and also I don't trust him not to cut any corner he can, and while he can still cut corners on the handout, at least they're nicely delineated corners that will take a bit more effort to cut.

So I sent him a reply:

Everything that's in the handouts I gave about it. If you no longer have your handout, ask Ms. -Boss- for one. You can tell her that they're with my lesson plans.

Ms. Miriam

ok but all i need is stuff like a letter stating my business plan and the plans that i will take to make it happen right?

No, student, no. You need a business plan, with all the information that entails. Like is spelled out for you, step-by-step, specifically designed to make it as easy as possible to include all the information you need, in the template/worksheet handout.

It's not a letter. It's a specific document providing all the information that is asked for in the handout.

Ms. Miriam

Mind you, this whole exchange happened within the space of two hours. Which I think is pretty good for a random email sent to me WHILE I AM ON VACATION.

I just found this email, which was sent at 1am this morning:

ok i have to turn it in tomorrow and i don't have the time to come up there and get can you just tell me ms. Miriam and i can get it done

Upon reflection, I strongly suspect that "tomorrow" means today. (And, y'know, I would feel a lot more inclined to put effort into this, like maybe trawling through my work email to see if I can find a copy of the handout in question, if he'd showed ANY interest in getting this done during the last two weeks of sort-of-actual school, when everyone and her mother was getting on his case about finishing all this stuff. Or even if he'd managed to pay any attention to it last week. This student needs to learn to deal with the fact that deadlines are deadlines and you need to meet them. And by this point, I'm not feeling very sympathetic. And I don't have the information he wants.)

No, I can't. I told you that I needed it by three Thursdays ago. If coming to school was not convenient for you, you should have made sure at that point in time that you had all the information you needed.

I'm not in Pennsylvania right now, and I do not currently have a handout with me.

Ms. Miriam

I CCed my boss on that one. I'm pretty sure she'll back me up.

Dear friend from high school, (who I ran into at the dance last night and has no super-secret lj code name because I've never needed to talk about her before)

Your facebook profile definitely *is* hidden. Possibly you will figure this out and track me down.

Me

Okay, dear, that's enough. No more sources, no more bibliography, no more articles. Set the books aside, and buckle down and write the outline. It won't set anything in stone. It doesn't even have to be a particularly good outline. You've done just fine in 17 years of formal schooling without ever acquiring any particular talent for writing outlines, and this is the last one you'll need to do in the foreseeable future. Just write it, and send it to the prof. Then you can take a shower and go to dinner and finish your math homework, and maybe, if you're extra lucky, have some time left over to be ridiculous.

This bleh with regards to productivity is really unattractive. I know that ConBust was last weekend and Fencing Nationals is tomorrow, but you still need to exert actual effort on your classwork, particularly on that Combinatorics midterms that you still don't know how to answer three problems on.

Cheers,
You

Losing your passport shortly before you leave Spain would have been a really stupid thing to do, particularly since you had it last week.

Next time, check all the pockets of your backpack before having a minor freak-out. Better yet, don't let there be a next time.

Thanks,
Me

You're not being very helpful. Given that I'm here in Spain, it would make sense for me to take a literature course that would fulfill one of my 200-level requirements in addition to just taking classes in Spanish to fill up number-of-classes requirements.

I e-mailed my advisor six days ago to ask if Class A or Class B would be suitable, and she hasn't gotten back to me. I was aware when asking her to be my advisor that she could be a little slower in answering e-mails than I might like (but not this slow!), but I was kind of in a rush about that decision because my pre-major advisor, also in the Spanish department, was on sabbatical - which no one had told me - and no one else bothered to inform me that it was necessary to declare one's major before applying to go abroad.

Since I would really like an answer on this topic before classes start next week, I decided to e-mail the department head. Only, you seem to have seen fit to not post that information on your website. I had to go to the course catalog via the registrar (to a section of the website that I didn't actually know existed, and was just hoping it was) in order to figure out who I should be e-mailing.

It seems to me that a LANGUAGE department might put a little more effort into making things accessible to students abroad.

Please write back,
me.

This one is worse; I think that she either ran out of the paper she got from Edith, or her paper got wet somehow. Or both. At any rate, I'll add the text of the letters in the alternate text.

( Jaclyn's correspondence )

A young street rat takes this to the barge:


( Rest behind cut. )

( Cut for length )

I hate being sick. If I hadn't been feeling rotten last night and had been productive, I could be finished my Spanish paper by now.

I called Damon and told him that I'm not coming in to work today. I think that I'll go to Ed Psych, in which I will be useless but which I should go to because we're presenting, and then I'll come back to my room and turn on Sense and Sensibility and pretend that I can actually take naps.

Edit: We didn't actually present today. I guess I'm glad I went; the other presentations were pretty good.

And for those of you who have been following the epic of my math final, ( Read more... )