It's Before Noon and I Need a Stiff Drink

Or at least a decaf latté.

I spent my morning playing Mean Money Person and telling people that we will NOT reimburse them for the ginger ale and barbeque chips that they enjoyed at an airport on the way to the symposium. Furthermore, we will not reimburse incidental hotel charges, including $100 in fees for Internet access.

After sending out a string of polite, yet firm, emails, I've moved onto my next task. Our center's director often edits papers written by research assocites while he's on planes or other such places. These are hard copy edits, which means someone has to migrate the changes into the Word files. I usually give these items to students and then carefully check their work. But there's a paper sitting on my desk that is startlingly horrendous.

I haven't read the actual text yet, I'm just judging by the number of pen marks strewn about the pages. I believe every sentence has at least one change.

And, the hand writing is nearly undecipherable.

In cases like this, once you count in questions and review time and correcting the corrections, it would be more work to give it to a student. So, I must get into the director's head and figure out just what the hell this chicken scratching means.

*Sigh*