Abject finger-pointage

1. THEY MONITORED THE SITUATION. OK, so today’s the first day of the semester, which is bad enough, but then, at about 7:15 this morning, I get this peevish call from The Rebellious One.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“You won’t believe this! G*d d***it! Jesus ******* ******!” she said (more or less).

The Reb’s the chair of her department. Turns out the CEC temporaries that her department depends on weren’t ready. She and her colleagues had students, but no classrooms. She was seriously screwed.

We’ve chronicled the sorry state of the CEC shitboxes on these pages. Thankfully, a while back, the board granted “basic aid” funds for replacement shitboxes. Great! So when the spring semester ended, the old temps were summarily knocked down. We smiled. “Things are lookin’ up!” We stomped upon the wreckage.

But then nothing happened. “What gives?” we said. Then, finally, just a couple of weeks ago, workers put up the new temps in a big hurry. But they didn’t finish ‘em.

That brings me to last week. Assurances were being thrown around by administration that the new temporaries would be ready to go by Monday. “We’re on top of it!” they said.

Well, we’ve heard that before.


The thing that irks everybody is that administration had a whole goddam summer to put up these buildings. How come they were built at the last minute?

No doubt that’s somebody else’s fault.

Plus, how can it be that nobody was informed that there might be a problem with the new buildings until the first day of classes?

Somebody’s f*ckin’ up bigtime.

Today, various administrators, faculty, and classified employees worked hard to redirect students to new rooms, and they did a great job. They deserve a lot of credit. But Jeez.

At about 3:30 this afternoon, President Roquemore sent out a memo about this “crisis.” He flat blamed the contractor. He took no responsibility at all.

But why did his crew wait until the very last minute to tell affected faculty and deans that they had no rooms? Well, says Rocky, it’s like this:

Last week it was becoming apparent that we could not trust that the electricity would be connected in time for Monday classes. Director of Facilities and Maintenance, Wayne Ward, ordered a back-up generator to provide the electricity if needed. The contractor assured us that we would be able to connect it to the buildings if needed. Wayne worked through the weekend to monitor the progress of the contractor. The contractor’s electrician did not show up over the weekend to install grounding rods that are required before electricity, for any source, can be applied to the building. This rendered the back-up generator useless. In addition, the contractor did not complete required ADA work and then let the crew off work today…On Sunday morning, Wayne informed me that the grounding rods would not be installed and that the generator could not be used.

This is unmitigated finger-pointage. To hear Glenn tell it, nobody at IVC is responsible. On the contrary, they did what they could to “monitor” progress. They deserve a prize, I guess.

At IVC, there’s lots of grumbling about the “old boys network” that seems always to protect managers who, in some cases, just don’t seem to know what they’re doing. Or worse. (More on that at another time.)

2. CAN I USE GLENN’S TIE? This morning, many instructors ran into yet another SNAFU that affected the classroom. I won’t describe it, cuz I’m not sure who’s responsible, and, for all that I know, the mistake is an uncharacteristic screw-up by a good employee. So forget I even mentioned it. I guess.

But I will mention that, when I visited the restroom this morning, upon washing my hands, I found that there were no paper towels. Had to use my shirt. Jeez. That sucks.

Happens all the time.

3. THE COPS ARE KEY-LESS. Some time after 11:00 this morning, a student popped into my office to tell me that a colleague of mine, Professor L of the English department, was locked out of his classroom and his whole class was sitting on the floor in the hallway like a bunch of hippies or something.

I ran over to B100 and learned that Professor L had called security to get the door unlocked. Guess what? Security didn’t have the key. The lock had been changed, but security (or whoever changes the locks) had failed to provid the dean or the cops with the new key!

Eventually, they got in the room. But c'mon!

4. HERNIATED DESKS. A year ago, we bought a big pile of new desks at IVC. Guess what? Already, the faux wood finish is peeling off of 'em. It's like paper. It's junk. How come we buy junk?


On the other hand, it sure was nice weather today. I'm surprised Glenn and crew didn't take credit for it.