Eric, Ike and I enjoy our frequent discussions of Simpson University's tendencies towards micromanagement. Maybe it's not really a tendency. Pretty much everyone who works at this school (besides student employees) has seniority over someone else. There is a plethora of titles and the myriad vice presidents have so many underlings that one would suppose a small army was being commanded. I didn't use a thesaurus for that last sentence. That would be cheating.
Today, most of the faculty and staff of Simpson are at a retreat/training day for the whole day, so the whole school is being run by student workers/staff. Actually, I just saw the VP of spiritual formation come inside (I'm at the front desk right now--one of the student staffers covering for the real staff). So, he's probably at the retreat for a half day and here for a half day. Anyway, the point of all this is to say that not only is the micromanagement frustrating to work within, incredibly cost ineffective and the source of many communication break-downs, but is entirely unnecessary, because a bunch of kids who don't even have college degrees yet are running the school for a day, and nothing has caught on fire yet.
I guess we do need leadership for the long term, but the fact that I have 3 superiors in my office alone (who are all under the head of admissions, under a vice president, under a president), that are over each other in a very specified order is very odd. Certain people are given the responsibility to be go-betweens (contacts is probably their official name) between the offices on campus, so they of course, must be given more authority than someone who is not a contact.
Considering that this whole school is on one data system, and everyone has e-mails, and most of the offices are in the same building, you'd think that someone would figure out that when people need to be laid off for budget cuts, you lay off the unnecessary contact people, and not teachers.
Last fall, Eric, Jackson, Ike, and I (maybe some other people) discussed shooting a show called "The OC (the Owen Center)" based on all that students do in this big ol' building. Now, we want to do it as a reality show about the micromanagement and wacky departments that Simpson has. This is a long rant about work. I actually really like my job, but I think this school could do things a lot better, and not have to raise tuition as a result.
In other news, I thoroghly enjoyed playing Uno last night with Kate, Levi, Rachael, Ike and Eric in Eric's lobby. I think we played speed uno, but I don't know what it's called. I had only played regular uno before, and it had been a long time. I had a bad wrist yesterday, so slapping the table wasn't that fun, but it feels better (for the most part) now. This blog is long because I'm bored, hungry, and I feel like typing a long thing really fast. I may just start writing random stuff when I'm done. we'll see. OOH!! Haiku time! I'm going to e-mail them to myself and then maybe I'll post them.
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