I didn't see C on campus. Word is, terminated employees are only allowed back on campus with human resources supervision, so she had to schedule a day next week to come clean out her desk. I emailed her personal account to ask if I could pack for her or bring stuff to her home but I haven't had an answer. I left a gift bag with a card and the Queen Anne's Lace shawl on her desk.
The faculty in general are pretty angry about the staff terminations. We have not been told who was let go, so we keep finding out only when our emails to specific staff go to someone else. A group of us started compiling a list, just so we know something, as there has been no messaging about what positions no longer exist or who to contact instead. Three of my favorite staff are on the list. The administration seems to assume the faculty are completely absent from campus, physically and mentally, right now.
My lab manager is furious at how all of the staff was treated. She would quit if she didn't have a child in college using our tuition exchange benefit. I don't blame her, either, although the thought makes me nauseous. The department would not be able to function without her. Maybe, for a couple of weeks not during a pandemic, but definitely not now. I remember what it was like when our previous staff person quit and there was a month gap before our current person started. I worked seven days a week just to have minimal labs prepared in addition to my other work, and none of the other stuff like ordering, inventory, maintenance, and compliance was done at all.
I worked in the lab two and a half days this week. I made all the unknowns for quantitative analysis first because I was worried we would need to order more supplies, but I had enough. Then I started photographing the lab experiments as I do them. I'm working backwards from the last-scheduled, in case we switch to fully online partway through the semester, hoping that the students get to be in lab in person for the first few experiments, at least. I plan to take the photos and put them in order in a Google Slides or something like that so the students can follow along, read the data from the photos and do the analysis themselves. I took my old digital camera because I thought it would be easier to transfer files from that to my office PC rather than my iPhone, and it is but the quality of the photos is surprisingly poor. I think I'm not getting the auto-focus to work properly and I don't have the motivation to repeat everything again, so I'll probably just annotate the photos when they're a bit fuzzy.
The other days, I spent time working out some experiments the general chemistry students can do at home or in their dorm rooms, on the weeks they are not in the lab. Our current plan is to split each lab section into two groups and have them alternate coming to lab, but they need something to do on the non-lab weeks. I found a book while I was unpacking my office that has a bunch of home chemistry experiments and I'm modifying those. I plan to make up little kits to check out to the students so they can take all the supplies with them and be ready whenever we might switch to fully online. The biggest question is whether I can buy sixty or so small digital balances in time, because most of the experiments require a balance.
It's July and every year I feel like a switch is pulled July 1. On that date historically I go from "no problem, plenty of time, enjoy summer" to "OMG I have so much to do and there's only a few weeks left!" I felt the threat of July all week this year, but the level of panic does not seem to be worse. Or maybe it is and my weepiness and my inability to sleep a full night are signs that I'm pretending not to recognize. I haven't slept past about 4 a.m. in at least a week now. For a few days I was getting out of bed and reading on the sofa until it was the normal time to get up, but the last several days we've had such hot weather (temperatures above 30 C, lows only down to about 20 C at night) that I started getting up an hour earlier so that I could take my walk before it got uncomfortable to be outside. This works, but now I fall asleep watching TV at 9 p.m. and still wake too early.
Next week we have our first meeting with the new Provost. He asked us to submit questions ahead of time on a Google Doc, and people have been typing those in all day today. It would be amusing if most of the questions were other than "How is the college going to keep us all from dying next month?" So that meeting should be interesting.
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