It’s Saturday morning. It’s cool outside (54 degrees! — 12 if you speak Celsius), and I am relaxing with a cup of Cafe Yaucono that I brought back from Puerto Rico and ran through the French press this morning. (Does anyone know if they make automated / programmable French presses? Cos I could totally get into that…)
Ray commented last night that I am neglecting my blog (I wouldn’t say I’ve been neglecting it: it’s been hacked twice in the past two weeks and I spent a good chunk of Tuesday locking it down to prevent a third occurrence).
But here’s why: there’s a big conference coming up at work at the end of next week, in honor of a professor who passed away last year. Since the summer, I’ve been wrangling an organizing committee (a bit tantamount to standing up cooked spaghetti) consisting of dear colleagues who want to honor said professor. Read another way: the organizing committee consists of people who have massive personalities and are capable of causing all sorts of massive drama.
Professor A, one of the two co-chairs, is a sweet guy, but bizarrely capable of getting his feelings hurt very easily. He also displays an innate tendency to bring an issue before the committee, which is discussed and agreed upon in a meeting where he takes no notes, and then goes back and reports something different to the people involved. For example: “How long should the Thursday keynote speak?” We decided that the talk should go no longer than 30 minutes as we don’t want the event to go longer than two hours. He then reported to the keynote speaker that she should be prepared to speak for 30-40 minutes, and would have 20 minutes for questions.
Seriously.
Professor B, who is the professor who sent the nasty message that put a sour spin on my last few hours in Cairo over the summer, has since then actually been very easy to work with.
Professor C is a handful. I believe my facebook status earlier this week read, in reference to her, “She’s such a pill that if I could bottle and market her, I’d be a millionaire.” She’s written one book that won tons of awards–as well it should: she spent TWENTY YEARS writing it. Her main goal in life is to make sure that people know that she’s in the room.
How this all plays out is as follows:
Thursday morning.
A drafts the program for the conference and sends it around. It’s formatted wildly, so I spend a good chunk of time reformatting it and pass it around. It takes two hours for someone to notice that all of the panel chairs are wrong and another hour for someone to notice that half of them are at the wrong times. When this is expressed, Professor A responds that, “Well, I didn’t have my notes in front of me, so I just made things up and figured that someone would catch the error.”
I choose, for political expediency, not to respond by pointing out that it might have been more useful for him to make a notation to that effect, or, heaven forbid, actually say, “Hey, I don’t have this information on hand, can someone fill it in?”
B asks if the program and poster can be sent around electronically so that everyone can send it out on their listservs. The program and poster are online, so I send out a message containing the links to the files.
B then responds that … well, never mind. It’s too much work for her to download the files (also, she wants to know if the 11X17 poster and the 8.5 x 11 program can be put in the same document), so, as I’m getting ready to go to a meeting, I quickly send off the poster and the program to everyone as an attachment.
In my haste, I send a slightly older version of the poster. The only difference between this version and the new version is that one speaker isn’t included on the list of presenters. Unfortunately, said speaker happens to be …
Professor C. Who writes me exactly 30 seconds later complaining about this, and then asks me, “Shall I just plan not to speak, then?”
Allow me to say it here: !!!!!!FUCKING BITCH!!!!!!
I feel better now.
When I get back to my office, I send out the “new” poster (which Professor C has already found online, because there were approximately 47 new messages waiting for me detailing every moment of her exhaustive search for a document whose location I had already sent out, but let’s give Madame Indiana Jones credit here because she wants it).
And so, we’re set. Right up until we discover that A has scheduled someone for a panel on Friday morning who was originally told he’d be talking on Saturday, and isn’t arriving until Friday afternoon.
I know that Thou Shall Not Kill is one of the big 10, but … surely there are exceptions, aren’t there?
