Monumental

The semester is half over. Today I finally got an English copy of one of the textbooks for my course. Five weeks late. Now I admit that the length of the delay is actually in large part my fault. But the fact that there was a delay at all is not my fault, and deserves a rant. The department I'm teaching in doesn't provide textbooks for faculty.

Huh??

I've never heard of such a thing. If you don't own your own copies, you have to check the books out of the library, where you're at the mercy of due dates and other people's borrowing habits. By the time I figured this out, the library's copies of my textbook were, not surprisingly, checked out. So the library ordered another copy for me because I'm a technically professor (I so don't feel like one), but it took a while. Then when I went to pick up the book today, I realized I'd requested the wrong title. Try explaining that in Spanish without looking like an idiot. [To my credit, we're using an obscure book by an author who's also written a very famous book. I thought the slight differences in the titles was just a translation issue and requested the famous one. Oops.] Finally, I think just to get me to go away, the woman at the library loaned me a reserve copy of the right book, although by then I'd already tracked down a Spanish version that I can actually read pretty easily, making the whole library fiasco pretty much for naught. The fact that I can be a colossal fuckup clearly did not help the situation. But still: The University does not provide textbooks for faculty. That's just fucked up.

And then, after all that Spanish library negotiation, I had to go get my hair cut in Spanish. I was pretty much Spanish-ed out by then (your brain really just shuts down after too much time speaking a language you don't really speak), so communication was pretty minimal. I was at least able to express that I didn't want a mullet (had to do it delicately, because my hairstylist had a mullet herself), although I still got more layers than I really wanted. Whine.