Tuesday, September 25, 2007

It's so hot I hope it storms

I work in an office on campus. One of the many necessary and vitally important jobs I'm in charge of is compiling and typing up course evaluations and emailing them to the correct instructors and chairpeople. I used to like this job because it meant that I could sit at my desk for a while and do mindless work and sometimes I could sneakily listen to one headphone of my iPod. However, recently, as I've had a stack two feet high of evaluations to tabulate and write up, this job has become the ban of my life. Especially with the really abysmal handwriting some of these engineers have. I mean, really. On the other hand, I suppose that perhaps this is how people feel when trying to read my handwriting.

Today I emailed off a whole bunch of finished evaluations, several to people who I had never emailed evaluations to. Usually I don't hear back from the instructors, but today I got three email responses back. Two of them were just thank you's, but the the third one made my day. The instructor wrote back to me, "Thanks, A. Noted that the comments wanted a second day on RPA. Did I have too much material or did they want more time with RPA?"

What? Is he asking my advice?

Listen, buddy, I just type up the darn things. I don't even know what an RPA is. Or a VTR or the A3 or most of those technical terms and acronyms. I know about Six Sigma and VSM and Lean only in relation to the fact that we teach courses on them. But I had to smile, because I wonder who this instructor thinks I am. I'm mildly tempted to write back and say that maybe he should think about trimming his material but putting in more funny stories and maybe instead of focusing on the RPA he could focus on the PAR. I think, however, that in the best interests of both of us, I'll just defer his question to his chairman.

That would be the best thing to do, of course...

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