Other than THAT, Mrs. Lincoln...

What a week. Next week promises to be, in teacher speak, "just as challenging." I'm double booked again--need to be in two separate places at one time without time to eat or pee as I challenge the forces of the universe to split myself into two and deliver two lectures in two different locations to two different groups of students. It amazes me that the same person who scheduled me into simultaneous lectures can't see why this would be a problem--I mean, she honestly doesn't understand the basic principle that a too too solid object such as myself can't work in two different buildings at precisely the same time. When I brought this up--rather nicely, for me--she stared at me with big sheep eyes and said, "Why you have a problem this?" I said, patiently, "It's impossible for one teacher to give a lecture to a group of students in Building One while also giving a lecture on a different subject to teachers in Building Six at the exact same time." The kicker? She sneered and said I was--and I quote--- "so lazy." (This from a woman whose mother lives in to do all the housework, and who farms out her three year old on a permanent basis to a family in the countryside because she's too busy with her "career" which includes two-hour power naps after lunch to take him to day care herself.) Lazy? Hmmm...silly me, busting my ass through grad school instead of mastering the time-space continuum so that I could perform twice the work for a single salary.

A colleague suggested that perhaps this woman is deeply stupid, a theory I agree with in part, but then I thought of a sneakier approach, and I emailed to say that if I had to teach TWO classes at once then I wanted double pay. Funny, when the issue of extra payment comes up, people here tend to pay attention. So we'll see what happens with this. Deeply stupid this woman may be--and yes, she is--but when it comes to money, whatever dim bulb is in her brain lights up and she works with ferocious intensity to figure out how to screw the foreigner out of the last sou. Let's see her greasy-haired pony-tail bob up and down as she sits over her calculator, frantically trying to work out how to get the most work out of me without paying extra. I hate to be a bitch about schedules,  but come on, if you have a job which entails scheduling people, LEARN HOW TO DO IT RIGHT!