October 15, 2004
BWAH!
I'm so glad I'm leaving this department!
Bush's third and most-favored child, the No Child Left Behind initiative, is designed to help better educate the children of today. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE TEACHERS OF TODAY?!?! NCLB requires that future teachers of America be required to learn technology and use it in their classrooms. But it doesn't require one thing: that today's teachers of tomorrow's teachers ALSO learn the technology. Case in point: a copier.
Yes, that's right. SEVERAL times a day, I hear the horrible utterance, "ARGH!" followed by several "bee-bee-beeps" from the copier, followed by "Jeri, there's a misfeed!", which means, "Get over here and help me because I'm clueless!"
Our copier has a touch-screen display. When the copier misfeeds, it shows a diagram of the copier and then a cirular mark blinks right where the misfeed is located. One can simply open the doors of the machine, pull out the paper, close the door, and continue copying.
BUT NO.
I have to haul myself over immediately despite anything I might be working on to help joe professor pull out a piece of paper. Sometimes it can get tricky; I'll admit that much. But why do I have to be the one on my knees, on the floor, in a skirt, with a pair of pliers, scrounging for a piece of paper?
Because I'm "just the secretary."
Remember my Haiku Tunnel review, and how much I identified with Josh's use of the phrase, "just a secretary"? [Hold on a minute, a professor is asking me where the pencils are located, making me get up and fetch them instead of looking in the supply closet himself and finding them.] As just a secretary, my job is to do anything a professor deems as beneath him or her. This includes fetching pencils, setting up the copier for transparencies, clearing out misfeeds in the copier, emptying the hole punch tray in the copier, adding paper to the paper tray in the copier OR printer, putting a stamp on their mail and placing it in the mail tray, looking up phone numbers for them that they already have in their directory, looking up rosters that they already have access to online, and much much more. The one thing I've revolted completely against is making cofee. I refuse to learn how to make coffee just so I can plead ignorance when a professor asks me to make it for them. This isn't the 50s.
When a college professor with a doctorate degree can't understand how to set up an address book in his or her email system, or can't figure out what a blinking circular mark means on a diagram of a copier which contains the words "Please remove misfeed," I mourn for my present situation and relish the fact that I'll be gone in just a few more days.
Posted by wendytime at October 15, 2004 09:34 AM | TrackBack