Stood up and harrassed

Yep. I got stood up today but it wasn't such a big deal. After all, it was just a "date" with a colleague to discuss a proposal to institute a new course. Haha.

This happens to be the third time our meeting had to be postponed. We had agreed to meet two Fridays ago but I fell ill in the morning and had to go home before lunchtime. Before I left though, we reset the meeting to the next Wednesday, 31 October. But when I dropped by his office on Tuesday to confirm that meeting, he said he couldn't be around because he was driving his mother to a province far up north to see her dying father. So we decided to have our meeting today and as it turns out, he apparently forgot about it.

I had reported to work early today in order to get some things done before our meeting which I believed would start around 10am since my colleague usually shows up at work around that time. But as the hours rolled by and my colleague remained absent, I decided that he had forgotten all about our meeting (my cellphone battery was dead so I couldn't contact him either) and turned my attention to other pressing matters I had on my to-do list. So it wasn't so bad that I got stood up.

Besides, I had important letters to write for various purposes to administration officials in relation to the coming registration period. I was also busy with setting teaching assignments for our teaching staff for the coming semester--which is one of the toughest tasks I've ever handled as we are don't have enough faculty members to handle all the courses we need to offer each school term.

In fact, I nearly didn't get those done as I was always being interrupted by a constant stream of students coming in to my office to see me for all sorts of reasons. A small percentage of these were students who were dismissed due to failing grades and needed my recommendation to back up their appeal for readmission. These cases take a lot of my time as I have to review their supporting documents and talk to each student before deciding whether I should recommend approval or disapproval of his/her readmission. Some of the students were those whose final projects I was supervising as well and it took some time as well to read drafts of their final papers before I could approve of them. Most of the students though who came simply needed my signature for all sorts of forms they had to accomplish for the coming registration period. While it doesn't take too much time for me to ask a few questions before affixing my signature on the forms, these brief interruptions can still be annoying as they usually break my train of thought when I'm especially working on something difficult--like making teaching assignments!

Sigh. Such is my life in between school terms.