First Week Roulette

And so the first week of term approaches, and once more into the breach, you have to participate in a kind of roulette with whichever course you are in charge of: which particular administrivial details are going to lurk in wait and trip you up, and just how bad is the damage going to be?

Will it be the old classic, the double booking? Where a whole lecture might be wasted because another lecturer managed to get the room bookings people to renege on your booking of the lecture theatre 3 months ago and there isn't another room big enough?

Will it be the practical labs, which all got their computer systems updated over the summer, and nobody tested the software on it, let alone tell you that the programming environment the students all use doesn't work any more?

Will it be the technology that lets you down, as happened to a colleague of mine whose radio microphone picked up the wrong frequency and ended up broadcasting the aerobics session of a nearby gym to the whole lecture theatre?

One thing you are guaranteed: it's not going to be any of the things that happened to you before and that you carefully dodged this time. Oh no. It'll be a new one.