Sep 4, 2005

a catalogue of excuses

Friday: A new teacher needs to know what's on the sophomore curriculum. All my handouts are currently saved on a Mac that the tech guy just installed OS X on. Now it requires a username and password to boot up--and mine doesn't work. The tech guy is on vacation, return date unknown.

Saturday: The carpenters have turned my classroom into a staging ground in the war against siding. The floor is littered with air compressors and tool belts. Their fellow electricians replaced a set of surge-protected outlets with a solid steel plate; the nearest alternates don't work. The carpenters inform me that the electricians won't be in the building again until Tuesday, the day before school starts. The carpenters will be there, too, presumably finishing, and taking their toolbelts with them.

Sunday: Excel is crashing. The requisite update demands previous updates that I never installed. I can't quite configure Office Update to work on the campus network, so I have to download twenty-megabyte files over a 56k modem at home.

Distractions, obstacles, dilly-dallying, tangents, dithering, laziness, nerves, attention deficit, time constraints, hiccups, daydreaming, senior moments, meetings, computers, power outages, illness, fatigue, boredom.

It's a wonder anything ever gets done.

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