It wasn’t cool that I had to go, but at least it was cool.

Too bad it was raining.

In order to justify having lower middle management at the company I work for, my now immediate manager holds periodic meetings where we all go “yep, this is boring” while my lower middle management manager goes “Yep, I survive for another round!”.

To do this, we all have to travel to the main office where the final five of us working at private schools learn new information about the company. Fortunately, it was a pleasant 22 Celsius (71.6 Fahrenheit) which made the trip pleasant, but that cool weather brought rain so it was a trade off.

Oddly, there was some interesting information at the meeting: our assistant manager is now our manager; there are new forms to fill out and they are all on line; the company has changed names again: four times now? Five? It’s all confusing. The nature of our contracts has changed which could be good or bad three years from now.

The trouble is all this could have been delivered via email. The problem with that is the company I work for tends to not like to leave a paper trail.

Now, we don’t have to meet again until January or so. That meeting will be boring and useless too, but at least there’s a chance it will be cancelled by a snow day.

I felt relaxed and calm and was thinking about playing a game. That’s when I started panicking.

The school where I work scheduled final marks for today. This involves turning in Optical Character Recognition forms written in pencil and waiting until the marks are printed and then checking them for mistakes. However, since we finished classes yesterday, all members of the foreign staff turned their marks in yesterday. This meant we didn’t have to arrive at work until around 4:00.

Of course, this let me get relaxed and distracted which meant I had period fits of “holy crap, don’t forget to go to work. Am I missing work right now?”

Soon after I arrived at the school, the printouts arrived and the head of the department confirmed yesterday’s mistake. I checked everything and went down to the computer room to correct my mistake, which involved writing a “T” one space too far to the left. (No. Really. That was the mistake.) The funny part is, it wasn’t even my class. It was the class I’d accepted a bribe to mark.

After that, I had to fill in the “class switcher” form which transferred students from my JHS 1 class to a different class. This should have been painless, but the form is, how should I say “unintuitive “. As I filled out the form, I did resist the urge to send my bad student down, even though he had a fairly decent score.

I’ll probably regret that next autumn.

I put out a fire after being thrown under a bus. Then things got weird.

The last day of classes is strange.

I arrived at the school where I work to discover a battery charger for a video camera on my desk. Its presence was apparently my fault. A colleague with a knee-jerk tendency to blame his fellow foreign staff for problems suggested that I look in my desk for something I never touched. (As if I were stupid enough to not realize that something might be in my desk or not. I suspect he used to work for a computer company’s customer service center, but that’s a future post.)

Even after I pointed out that different brands of cameras were involved, he still acted as is I didn’t know my Canon cameras from my Sony cameras.

In his defense, I took some time to recreate various situations as if I were Benedict Cumberbatch retreating to a mind palace and worked out that the problem was not my problem. I returned the battery charger to the place from whence it came–with a story that explained everything– and will wait further blame.

After that, I realized that a colleague had made mistakes on her final marks forms. (She has bribed me with rare cheesecake Oreo cookies to check her final marks.) It took a few minutes to fix the mistake, but I suspect I made a mistake myself. Luckily, I’ll be around tomorrow to fix the mistakes.

Hopefully, I won’t have to deal with a battery charger. Unfortunately, the Oreo cookies are already gone.

It is often said that past success does not guarantee future success. No one mentioned it could lead to current hassles.

I’ve mentioned before that a small software glitch caused me to teach our oldest and youngest a few new “expressive” words (and more than a few snarls, growls and “are you shitting mes?”). What was especially frustrating was that the glitches were occurring in a spreadsheet I’d been using for over a decade with no trouble.

Granted, this year I decided to make changes, but the basic formulas remained the same. However, yesterday the spreadsheet decided to accept the data and not recognize the formulas. They were still there, but they weren’t working. I eventually got them working (after much “expressiveness” and then took the file to the school where I work and entered the data in the official spreadsheet.

The trouble is, the formulas weren’t working on the official spreadsheet either. They’ve also been in use for over a decade and the problems we have with them are usually user error.

I used my trick to get them working and it forced the formulas to work but didn’t fix the problem. New data led to the need for new “fixes”.

Granted, there’s probably a simple fix to all this, although finding it on a Japanese version of the software isn’t always that easy. We also run the risk of marks being wrong which, this time of year, is more of an annoyance than a problem, but it can lead to complaints from students and parents.

I’ll try to figure it all out tomorrow. In the process my Japanese colleagues may learn a few new “expressive” phrases.

I could just copy yesterday’s post, but that wouldn’t quite be fair. Instead, I’ll just riff on the same topic.

Today I finished marking all my junior high school exams and somehow managed to tally the marks and enter them into the computer. This involved minor swearing at technology (long story for a future post) and discovering sections I hadn’t marked and scores I hadn’t tallied as I went along.

As I enter the marks I then have to assess the assessment. Was it too easy? (In one case, yes.) Am I marking too easily? (If I am it’s probably out of relief for having students, albeit only a handful of them, actually follow the instructions.) Can I manipulate scores enough to fail that little jerk and get him sent to the lower level class? (That remains to be seen…)

However, once I took my break, I stayed on break. I still have class marks to figure (that is where the little jerk will fail) but couldn’t be bothered to do much else.

I’m working tomorrow and can figure all the class marks after that. Then, starting Monday, passback classes begin and we get to annoy the students by passing out their summer homework.

I’m not sure what the weather was like today, even though I was sitting next to an open window. I know that it was cloudy in the morning and stayed reasonably cool the rest of the day. That’s all I know, though, because I didn’t bother looking outside.

For reasons no one fully understands–except possibly bad karma–I’ve got 11 days to mark 55 exams but only five days to mark 160 and on one of those days I’ll be working. This means I spent the entire day today plodding through exams with a random TV show on in the background.

After much plodding, a couple naps and too much sugar, I’ve got the work load to the final push phase. One set of exams is finished and the scores figured while two more sets are waiting to be finished. All that’s left are the long writing sections, one set of which will be easy whilst the other set is going to be annoying.

Unfortunately, it appears every student wrote something–fortunate for them, unfortunate for me as that means I have to actually read something before assigning a mark.

Well, at least I’m supposed to. We’ll see what happens when time starts running short.