Lately there have been some strange issues at the school where I work.

The new department head, after struggling with the arrangement that involves all the native speaker staff working at the school but not for the school and therefore having to deal with people she’s never met (shockingly long story) has suddenly become serious about paperwork.

The school where I work still does a lot of things old school, including using Optical Character Recognition bubble sheet forms for final marks and not processing any marks until all the marks are turned in. They are also fans of paperwork.

Several times a year we get forms we are expected to fill out and turn in by certain dates. The problem is, the forms are usually in Japanese and are unnecessarily complicated despite having small spaces for writing. If the forms aren’t turned in, someone usually contacts one of us and we quickly fill out the form and turn it in.

Lately, though, the new department head has become quite forceful about the paper work. Even forms that aren’t applicable–for example, the form for students who will fail because of too many absences–must be turned in even if the form just has a scribbled “NA” on it. She’s been confronting us rather snarkily in the office about the forms and we find the forms, fill them out and turn them in.

Today we were admonished that “all forms must be turned in”. The problem is that we technically don’t work for her and she’s not supposed to be able to give us orders. If we did work for her, I most likely wouldn’t accept being treated that way and would be rather snarky back.

We play along, mostly because we want the school to hire us direct, but I feel a confrontation coming on when her end of year pressure meets our end of year stress.

Hopefully it won’t be me. Unfortunately, the odds are not in my favor.