I’m sitting in the office at work, on a Saturday no less. I came in to try and set up my computer again. During the holidays some sweatervest-wearing 40-year-old numbnuts came in and erased everything on my hard drive, including all my old emails, tutorial presentations and handouts. I tore all my hair out when I realised and I’m now bald much before my time. Then, of course, they forgot to give me a password, and set the security settings so high that the numbnuts who was sent to help couldn’t even create a new account for me. At which point I nearly throttled the second numbnuts, but decided not to on account of I didn’t have a realistic case to plead temporary insanity. Arriving today, in the hope of finding everything in order once again, I was greeted by a friendly note. Addressed to me but sitting on entirely someone else’s desk. It said: ‘Mark - all postgrads will be on active directory from Friday and you can log on then’. No explanation of what ‘active directory’ is of course, and just as it was fated to be, I cannot log on. AAargh!!

Let me list my further frustrations with the admin around here, just for the record:
$200 dollar office equipment rebate - didn’t tell me when the deadline was so I missed out.
$1600 conference trip to New Zealand - declared (after the application was handed in) that first year students were ineligible.
Library books - largely absent from the library due to never being bought.
Library staff - look at me funny.
etc.

Meanwhile, the girl on the next desk forgot to log off her eMac when she left in December, so I’m using that today. I wonder if anyone would notice if I swapped it with my PC? Oh, and in other news, I looked for chairs in K-Mart but their chair section is being renovated so I improvised a new chair using a packet of cable ties, one third of the old chair, a milk crate and a Sunbeam electric grill. I’m not poor, I just don’t know where any shops are.