Essay requests

I've had enough of undergraduate essays. And I haven't even started marking yet.

The Philosophy Department had essays due at the end of term. Lots of essays. For some reason, and I don't know what it was, 8 courses had essays due by 5pm last Friday. So there was a mountain of essays to date stamp, mark in as submitted, and sort out for tutors. Usually all of that wouldn't be my job. But early on Monday, the undergrad secretary had to go home ill, so she sent me an email asking me to deal with them. When I got to work on Tuesday morning, I started sorting them out; first into piles for each course, then into piles for each tutor for the courses where there was more than one. They are submitted anonymously, by Student ID rather than name, so logging them as submitted was a two stage process - matching name to ID and then marking the date of submission next to the name in the file (the ID number is also there, but it would take hours to match them manually).

One of the lecturers came into the office and said she needed to collect her essays for marking, and she had told the undergrad secretary this. I explained she was away sick, and I was processing the essays and I'd get to hers next but someone else had already asked for theirs. She said OK, and started to leave, and then muttered that his could wait and she needed hers urgently today. I said I would do them next. And they were all done in plenty of time for her to catch her train, but it did confuse my system because I had to do her option unit and then some of the first year essays (sort out hers but not do all of them because that was the largest set, and none of the other first year tutors had asked for theirs; I knew other lecturers were waiting). It's a very boring job, but also requires a certain amount of systematic concentration to make sure no one's essay goes astray or doesn't get logged. As a general rule, though, please have some patience when only 2 of 4 office staff are working, you aren't the only memeber of staff asking for essays so that they can go away for Christmas (I am working until 23rd) and one is trying to catch up on something that would have been done the day before if another wasn't off sick.

I wasn't working on Wednesday, so today I had to finish off the essay organising. On Tuesday, I'd made a list of what I'd done for each course: stamped, noted as submitted, contacted tutor, given to tutor etc. I started on the courses that I hadn't already noted down, and when I'd done that I began to send out emails to tutors.

Until I couldn't find a batch of essays.

I looked all over my office. I looked all over the undergrad secretary's office. I checked my list to see if I had actually marked them as in (and I had - I'd even left a note to myself about a student in the records). And I panicked. Out of all the essays I had sorted and moved around I just couldn't work out where I might have left them. So I went to see the tutor who ran the course, and asked if I'd given them to him. "Oh! Yeah," he said, "I came in and took them yesterday. I probably should have left you a note, or something". Yes. Yes you should. So for the record:

NEVER, under any circumstances should you just TAKE essays out of a pile in the secretary's office without at the very least leaving them a note. EVER.

Please.