Friday Fragments: The Administrator Edition

It's been a strange administrator week--but has it been any stranger than most?  Let me record some fragments and see:

--Monday was the kind of quiet day in the office when I wondered if the campus had already closed and I hadn't been notified.  The rest of the week, however, made up for that lost time.

--Tuesday was the day that we had a student shaking and dizzy because he hadn't had food in weeks; I wrote about that day in this blog post.  The next morning, I applied for a microgrant to create a small food pantry on campus, and yesterday I found out that our proposal has been approved.

--One of our program chairs will now move to part-time as we look for her replacement, and she'll be working remotely.  Wednesday was a bit hectic, as it was her last day on campus.  I thought of the last days of others, and it seemed quiet--we didn't have a festive send-off party, although I did bring in a pan of butterscotch brownies that I baked.

--We discovered that phone calls to the campus have been routed to the Ft. Lauderdale campus.  I spent days this week returning to this problem, trying to figure out how to solve it, a process which involved IT which had questions, like "What happens when ______ can't answer the phone?"  I said, "It goes to voicemail."  That was my answer to several questions:  how hard is this????  By the end of yesterday, it seems the problem is fixed.

--Speaking of strange phone calls, yesterday a woman called and said, "The Ft. Lauderdale campus told me that I can just bring my dog in for an ultrasound without having an appointment."  Oh, I have so many questions.  Who might have said such a thing?  Do we have an ultrasound machine that I don't know about?  Without an appointment?   We don't have an ultrasound machine, and we don't see the pets of the public and if we did, we would require appointments, but we don't because we don't have the staffing or the insurance.

--Yesterday I was on a multi-campus phone call to discuss the programs we have, the programs we will have soon, and the long range plans.  We ended by suggesting other possible programs.  It felt strange to be discussing a future that won't include me.

--Yesterday I made this Facebook post:

"Because I'm a Lutheran who will go to a Methodist seminary, I have to affiliate with a Lutheran seminary, so I chose Southern. Today during my lunch break, I had a wonderful chat with the Admissions Coordinator at Southern, when I called just to make sure that I didn't need to be doing any paperwork or processes for them. I'm in good shape.

As we finished our conversation, I said that my dream job would be creating a program on Theology and the The Arts at Southern, or any other Lutheran seminary. I said it out loud, and the Admissions Coordinator said that it sounded wonderful.

It does sound wonderful . . . a bit like a call . . ."

That post inspired me so much that I wrote this piece for my theology blog so that I could dream a bit more.