The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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10:28am on Thursday, 11th June, 2020:
Anecdote
I'm only employed part-time at Essex University. Supposedly, this means 18 hours a week, but it comes to more than that (I'm supposed to be on annual leave at the moment, but I still worked 6 hours of yesterday on university-related business).
The worst thing about being part-time is that it doesn't mean 18 hours in blocks, it means 18 hours scattered throughout the week. For me, going onto campus on a Wednesday morning to speak to a student (who may or may not show up) isn't an hour, it's a morning. At least I'll be able to do it over Zoom in future; there are silver linings to the cloud that's Covid-19.
When I signed up to work at the university, I asked for Fridays off. This is because my wife has Fridays off, and because if I do have consultancy work to do I can safely book it for a Friday. Occasionally, the university would schedule events on a Friday (such as staff meetings), which I'd attend; I don't mind ad hoc incursions, but I do mind regularly-timetabled ones. Every year since I started lecturing again, circa 2002, I've had to fill in a form asking to be excused teaching on Fridays.
Last term, I had teaching timetabled for 9am on Fridays: absolutely the worst time for me, because when my alarm went off it woke up my wife on her day off, too. I can't say the students found it convenient, either, given how few of them attended. I'd acquiesced to teaching on a Friday because the lecture couldn't be scheduled for any other time when accounting for the number of students who were supposed to be attending and the other lectures that also had to be timetabled.
Eager to reclaim my Fridays, I therefore asked the Head of School if I could have the day off next academic year. He provisionally approved it, so I filled in the relevant form. However, this morning I received an email saying that he wouldn't be approving it — for a somewhat unexpected reason.
He didn't sign off on my application because it turns out that my work days are recorded in "the system" as being: 7 hours Monday, 7 hours Tuesday, 4 hours Thursday. It seems that I've always had Fridays off — along with Wednesdays and half of Thursdays, too. I could have refused to teach on any day other than Monday, Tuesday and half of Thursday.
I had no idea about this. I've been filling in forms for 18 years that I didn't need to fill in, because my contract stated not the hours per week (as I thought) but the hours per particular day of the week.
I'm therefore very pleased that the Head of School discovered (and revealed!) this information. Being able to tell the timetabling system that it can go boil its head if it thinks I'm going to teach on a Friday (or indeed a Wednesday) is a wonderful freedom!
It's a shame it took me 18 years to find out about it, though.
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Copyright © 2020 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).