I have been working extremely hard for The Place Where I Work pre-lockdown and during lockdown. To be honest, I feel exhausted. Last night, this caught up with me. I woke up once, between when I went to bed around 11:45 and 7 AM (at around 7 AM), and then I fell asleep again until 9:45 AM.
When I got out of bed, I felt like someone rolled over me with a steam roller, and I felt exhausted too.
Never mind. I’m a machine. I’ll just keep on working.
Today was supposed to be a day off. Hah! What’s a day off?
I ended up working until 5 PM. So much for a day off.
Everything that could go wrong, went wrong. One of the tutors emailed me. Oh, I’ve decided to change a slide on my presentation, can you update it (like, rerecord the entire video, put it on YouTube, wait for it to become high definition, then update the Moodle platform)? I just ignored it.
Government return due in April went tits up. I submit the updated fees files on 4 February 2020; they were just approved in the middle of the submission window. Then I found out our new student management system has nothing set to archive, so I have done a quick patch-up on that, and then spent a lot of the day dealing with cleaning up the files for the government return.
It just isn’t working out. Nothing is working out. Everything is much more complicated than it needs to be, and I am exhausted and fed-up and overtired, and it seems like no one cares.
Another Government agency was on my back about applying for us to temporarily deliver online but when the Prime Minister and her Cabinet instructs tertiary education organisations to “deliver online during the lockdown”, surely their advice supersedes all other advice?
I had a few free minutes today, so I started filling out the application. I finished it, saved it, then went to add the link to my email address and… it froze. For quite a while, so I force quit it. When I reopened Word — and seriously, Microsoft, what the fuck? Why are you forcing every app to save to the cloud instead of a local computer to upload to the cloud? I mean, how reliable is that right now? Hint: it fucking isn’t — there was a partially completed copy of it. Looking on OneDrive, it was a fucking blank document! So I was pretty hosed off. Thanks, Microsoft, for making my life more difficult than it needed to be.
Side note: the other day, I was working on making a PowerPoint slide show a mp4 movie. Every other slide show over the week before that went well. Oh wait! Microsoft decided in an update that the slide show turned movie shouldn’t save on the local drive. No. No! The horror. Let’s use up bandwidth because we’re really overly bloody ignorant on how bandwidth works in other countries and force the user to save on the fucking cloud! Great idea, Microsoft! (Not.)
So, trying to save the movie for the eightieth time, I figured out it has now (for whatever fucking reason) defaulted to the cloud and that was the problem. Once I save it locally, like I keep asking it to do, it saved fine.
I thought Microsoft and Google and all those organizations’ “solutions” were supposed to save us time, money, and resources. Hint: it’s not. We all don’t live in a Seattle or Silicon Valley with a gazillion megatrillagazillionbytes of bandwidth. Get with the program.
Breakdown: Microsoft is wasting time, resources, money, and all that jazz. They’ve been doing this for decades and still don’t get the hint. Don’t try to push the fold; be on the wave of what the world’s technology can handle. There is a huge difference.
So by 5 PM, when I finally finished work on my day off (ha!), I was mentally exhausted.
I just blanked out again as usual.
Today, we had another 5 cases of COVID-19 and another 2 deaths. Our death toll is now 17.
I know home — the USA — is getting hammered now. I’m really worried. I’m really worried moreso because there is a group of really ignorant and uneducated Americans who do not get the seriousness of this pandemic at all, and they are continually putting the entire country at risk. Even more dangerous, when anyone confronts them with science or rationale or ethics or any measurable good outcome, it becomes this argument like a debate with a sub-par moron from another galaxy who you have to explain basic concepts to like truth and honesty and scientific theory and basic principles on how biology, chemistry, and physics work. It’s exhausting and the really animalistic part of me is like, “Survival of the fittest. Let the motherfuckers die out,” but the higher thought process of me, the logical, ethical, moral part of me is like, “We need to get through this together and survive and it takes the strengths of the best of us to lead all of us through it.”
Who am I kidding? I have little faith in humanity any more.
Trump is telling people to put disinfectants in their bodies and shine UV radiation inside them somehow to solve this.
Serious. Like, seriously, what the fuck? What sort of moron is leading the USA?
I leave you at that. That’s all I have.
Beam Me Up, Scotty 