Today's scheduled advising was cancelled due to a downturn in enrollment. I spent most of today restructuring my online sections of interpersonal communication (of which more anon). I have some anecdotes to share from my first year, September 22, 1988 Bendnotes letter.
"A boy sits slumped in the comfy chair in Mary's office. He seems to have no focus, no interest in what he is about to do. In the office, standing, are his parents. It is they who look through the schedule, they who ask about sequences. His mother suggests a course of student. They look like blue collar people. . . . I do my speel [sic]. We come to some decisions. I call in the choices. They go across the hall to formalize the roughdraft by writing it onto the registration form with the green X. Then the Mom notices that I have made a mistake. She calls it to my attention. I apologize as I redial (getting a busy signal, so continuing to redial) and tell them that I am new. As they wait, the dad looks at a square of words, printed in crayon and felt tip pen on a paper the size of an album jacket on Mary's wall. He tells wife and son that it is an interpretation of Sargent Pepper's album cover. After I get through and fix my mistake, they leave, and the Mom says that she sympathizes with me -- her first week at her job at the hospital she didn't seem to be able to get anything right.
"Sometimes the computers go down. On Wednesday, somebody went to lunch and turned her's off. The other machines went nuts trying to talk to it -- creating a 'spurious echo' which resulted in the system going down for two hours with no back-up hard copy system. There was also trouble, Wednesday and Thursday, with the phones. By 3 pm Wed. it sometimes took a half hour of dialing and hanging up to get through to the operators. We would dial in shifts. When one of us in Deschutes got through, they would enter their student and then holler down the hall for other folks. Through it all, the operators remained remarkably calm."
No comments:
Post a Comment