so for all those who don’t know, i pay my way in the world right now by working in the IU Center for Math Education, which is a scarily large NSF-funded collaboration between the Math department, the School of Ed, and 9 school districts around Indiana whose teachers and administrators receive professional development from our workshops/materials/etc.
when i was hired, the arrangement was that i would spend most of my time collecting and organizing files on the “document computer” – a vision that the project director had for a central repository of the grant’s digital life, and creating a simple participant database that would live on the computer as well. quite quickly, however, the lines between the digital and physical realms blurred, my office became a dumping ground for everything, no one had a sense of what to do with it or how to gather what might be missing, and i started to pass some of my time helping the highly overwhelmed office staff in the math department with the processing of payments and the IU red tape that the grant needs to cut through to function.
that is really too much detail for this post, so i will just say that about 2 years have passed, and now we are at a point where my original job is forgotten and an inordinate amount of the locus of responsibility for the authorization of spending nearly $3 million a year lies with me – a part-time employee who is a graduate student the rest of the week, and whose entire understanding of budgets, contracts, and grants has been pasted together on the fly as demands arise.

i feel that this is fucked up, and there are days where i feel more compelled than others to say so.

last week i was notified that our funding for the new year has been held up because our former C&G officer has changed departments and the new people had a question about something that kept them from pushing the paperwork through. i answered their question two weeks ago, but the person who received the email was out of town, and then the person above her didn’t like my answer. so in the end i had to fax them a copy of a budget that someone else in their office had faxed me two weeks before. [pause to read that one again]
hopefully it is all set now, but i still just have to sit here and wait while the paperwork goes through, and in the meantime we can’t access our account. it is no one person’s fault, and indeed the people i have spoken with in other departments are quite friendly, but it is very stressful, and the whole affair is not my friend this week.
that is the nature of bureaucratic runarounds, and i am tired of it. i am tired of feeling incompetent all the time at something that i never claimed to be able to do in the first place; i am tired of feeling lazy because i don’t have the energy to devise babysteps that i can take to reform bureaucracy in 20 hours a week or less; and, perhaps most of all, i’m tired of realizing that i really am the most qualified person in my office to do this work despite all of my complaints, that i really do know as much as most of the other people around the university who are doing things like the things i do, that a great many large projects are handled at about this level of competency, and that the standards are simply not as high as i am telling myself i should attain…

i don’t know how to process all that. i feel sad and frustrated and relieved all at once. i tell myself to remember that my job is not really very hard, the blessings i receive from it in the form of tuition and stipends are large, and no one’s pretending that i’m going to do it for years to come, and all in all i feel lucky for my job 90% of the time.
but i still sometimes do things like press my forehead into the gel-filled wrist rest below my keyboard after getting off the phone with someone who was explaining things that i didn’t know existed as if i should have learned them in grade school.
i still sometimes get up and close the door of my office, take a deep breath, and whisper the title of this post into the air before going back to the computer to work on my capstone proposal while the university spins its cogs and wheels around my head…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 2:57 pm and is filed under ranting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.