At 10:07 this morning, after a solid hour of working on my take-home final exam (which I was doing, appropriately, at home), I received a phone call from one of my classmates asking why I wasn't at some TA meeting I didn't know about.
He then explained that the professor in charge forgot (oops!) to include me on the email telling everyone about the meeting and asked when I could be there. I explained that I was at home working on my exam and wasn't planning on coming to campus today. "Oh, okay," he said, "So when can you be here?" Apparently he hadn't listened at all to what I had just said.
I politely explained that it would take me 30-45 minutes to get there, but I still wasn't going to come in because I was in the middle of working on my exam (now 1 question away from being finished!) This seemed to annoy him greatly. This was also the moment when I learned that I had been on speaker phone the entire time, with everyone at the meeting (the one I didn't know about) listening in.
"So you can't come to the meeting?" the professor in charge asked. This question seemed odd, and idiotic, to me for a number of reasons. First, I had already explained that it would take me 30-45 minutes to get there, and the meeting presumably started at 10 (though no one ever confirmed this for me or told me what the meeting was about - but we'll get to that later). Second, I had also explained that I was in the middle of working on my exam - the exam I had planned to work on today because I did not have any other meetings or commitments. Third, were they just going to sit around for 30-45 minutes waiting for me to get there and then have a 5 minute discussion about an issue that could probably be addressed in, I don't know, an email?
Though everyone was evidently very disappointed/annoyed that I was not at the meeting I didn't know about and wasn't planning on showing up, they decided to carry on with the meeting - with me on speaker phone, like some sort of conference call. They then proceeded to ask me various questions (I still didn't know exactly what the meeting was about) and would then presumably discuss whatever I had just said for two or three minutes, even though I couldn't hear what anyone was saying. "So does that sound good to you, Robbie?" someone asked. "Does what sound good?" I asked, since I had heard nothing. Again, sighs of disappointment and annoyance.
So I'm still not sure what I was supposed to do, what the meeting was supposed to be about, or where I am supposed to go from here. All I know is that none of this was my fault - and that I would be finished with my exam right now if it weren't for all those idiots.
BOOO!
ReplyDelete