It’s Friday morning.  So, I should be in for a low stress day of coasting into the weekend?

Of course not.

This morning, I taught at 9AM.  I had office hours until 8:50 and a student actually came to ask questions, so I didn’t get to class as early as I normally do.  I walked up to the room at about 8:58AM and the door is LOCKED.  Who locks a classroom door?  On a Friday morning?  When the university is open and classes are being held?  I do not know.  But SOMEONE decided to do it to me.

The classroom is not in the same building as the math department office, so I don’t have a key to it.  I walked around the floor of the building I was in, and there were no administrative offices, so no one important with a key was around.  I went into someone else’s classroom and used the computer to look up the math department’s office number.  I didn’t have my cell phone on me, so I borrowed a student’s phone to call the math department.  I explained my predicament and they told me there’s nothing they can do.  Fabulous!

So, annoyed and, quite honestly, pissed off, I tried to think of something else to do.  Then a student told me there was an office downstairs and they could ask them if they had a key to the room.  The day was saved!  I took attendance in the hallway while waiting for someone to come unlock the door.  I started class 6 minutes late and didn’t get through all the material for that day, but at least I got to teach.

Oh, and the whole time, one of the students keeps saying “Is class cancelled?  Can we go home?”  NO.  Class is not cancelled.  I’ll teach in the hallway if I have to!

Grrrr.  I’m still coming down from the adrenaline high.  It doesn’t seem like a big deal, and the more times I tell the story, the more I listen to myself and think “That’s not that bad.  Much worse things could happen in life.”  But put yourself in the situation of having 30 college kids sitting in a hallway, staring at you, wondering what you’re going to do next, and how you’re going to solve this unforeseeable problem that not even the office staff in your department will help you with.  They didn’t even have a suggestion as to what to do.  I was just on my own, standing in a hallway with my students in front of a locked door, with one student nagging me to cancel class.  It’s a little intimidating, and at the very least super annoying and kind of stressful.

Oh, and now I have a break until 3PM, when I have to meet with one of my professors about possible research in representation theory.  I had some suggested (ie, required) reading to do on the topic, and I’m still not all the way through the material.  So I get to spend the next 4 hours trying to understand that.  Yay.

I mean, I’m excited about research, and the topic is interesting.  And apparently once I get past the basics and the algebra of it, there’s a lot of combinatorics involved in a lot of the open problems in the field, so that’s exciting and really appeals to me.  But I don’t have the time to grind through extra reading and teach myself new math RIGHT NOW.  I have assignments due in both of my core classes on Tuesday that I haven’t made any progress on yet, I have several social obligations this weekend that will take away from the amount of time I’ll have to spend on the assignments, and I’m physically and emotionally exhausted from a long week.

Plus, I hate afternoon meetings.  I can never concentrate and get as much out of them as I would if they were in the morning.  And Friday afternoon meetings are especially the worst.  The first 20 years of my life, I was a night owl.  I could run on 4 hours of sleep every night for weeks and stay up late and still be really productive around the clock.  But ever since the summer between sophomore and junior years of college when I started working at ABC and was working 8AM-5PM, I slowly transitioned into a morning person. Now my most productive hours are 7AM-noon. Then it’s lunch time.  And then I can usually squeeze out 2-3 more hours of productivity if I have to.  But after about 3 or 4 PM I’ll just be spinning my wheels for the rest of the day.  Weekends I can sometimes push these hours of productivity around to other times of day if I have been getting enough sleep.  But during the week, when I know I HAVE to be functional at certain times, mornings are best for me.  Maybe someday if I ever get to make my own schedule for myself my internal clock will adjust back to its original factory settings.  But for now, 7AM-2PM are my productive hours, 2PM-4PM is my naptime (I’m either asleep or wish I was asleep), 4PM-11PM is my relax time (TV, fun, or do some light work that doesn’t actually require a lot of thinking, but still needs to get done).  I inevitably do have to work in the evenings a lot of the time, but I try to either have that be typing up the work I did earlier in the day, filling in details from work I did earlier in the day, or doing non-school-work that is still work but doesn’t require much original thought.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on in Angela World on this Friday morning.  Sorry for all the whining.  Have a good weekend!