Another mercifully slow summer as admin seems to be serially estivating until the autumn. However, there is always the watchful eye of the Office of Dataprotection and Informationsafetymanagement here at the University of Not-Bielefeld, ready to leap selflessly into the void …
… only to fill it with a vacuum.
Their latest missive warns us about a particularly cunningly crafted phishing attempt going around currently that looks like this:
Let me know if you are free right now.
Thanks
No joke. That’s the e-mail. Except for spoofing the return address, the phishers have made little effort beyond that to disguise it. They haven’t even gone through the trouble of setting up a fake website to gather your data, phishing attempts that I regularly get bombarded with but never warned about. Instead, after you reply to the e-mail, we’re warned that they tell you that they are short of money and need you to purchase any of a number of online gift cards and send them the codes.
Do we really need to be warned about this? I mean, let’s take a look at the chain of brain farts required here to get reeled in:
Failing to recognize the e-mail as a phishing attempt, despite it being anonymous, in English from a predominantly German-language university, and, sigh, containing that gaudy banner indicating that it is not even from your predominantly German-language university;
replying to it;
accepting the fact that online gift cards are the usual way of helping “friends” out of a financial tight spot;
purchasing said gift cards; and
replying again to send the codes on to the phishers.
In this day and age and at this Institute of Higher Learning, if the alarm bells aren’t ringing at (1) and absolutely deafening at (3), then I don’t know how an e-mail warning us about the scam can possibly do any good either.
But then maybe admin just needs to reassure us every once in a while that they’re still there and working hard for us …
The latest bonehead comment of the day comes to you from Ryanair, with whom I flew with a couple times in the past few weeks.
For those fortunate few not familiar with Ryanair, it’s basically an infomercial at 30.000 feet. The tickets tend to be dirt cheap, but then you have to pay for everything on top of that: seat reservations, priority boarding access, extra baggage, and, once you’re up in the air, food, duty-free items, and lottery tickets. (Yes, lottery tickets in the form of scratch cards. And, like the duty-free items, they’re usually introduced using the word “amazing”.) At one point, there were even musings about charging to go to the toilet during the flight. Ryanair has been doing this for years and are now the model most other airlines are gravitating to by charging for stuff that used to be included in the price.
In any case …
A recent, pandemic induced change is that you could now only pay for the inflight unnecessities by card and not cash “because of COVID-19 restrictions”. We’ll ignore the fact that it has long been known that corona is unlikely to spread through surface transmission or that cards and the stuff you’re buying also have surfaces. What makes this explanation particularly boneheaded is that it was thoughtfully provided to us by a flight attendant who was not wearing a mask, who had earlier informed us that our wearing of a mask was only recommended but not mandatory, and who worked for an airline that no longer checked our vaccination status before boarding.
Breathe all you want, but God forbid that you ask me to carry change …
In and of itself, that’s probably not too surprising. After all, I’ve only been learning German for about half my life and, like any language, there are lots of words to learn. Even when you get past the swear words. And, depending on who you ask, German has a lot of words to learn: 15 000 in the average person’s active vocabulary, 135 000 in the official German dictionary, and a whopping 5.3 million in total (or 8x the total number of English words).
What is surprising, however, is that most Germans I asked didn’t know the meaning of the word either. The word? Entsendung. Translated into English, it means deployment or posting.
This immediately struck me as strange because the German prefix ent- is often used to negate the rest of the word. As in enthaaren (to remove hair from something), or entfrosten (to defrost), or even Ente (duck). Admittedly it does get tricky sometimes. Entgelt can mean either fee or reward (depending on which side of the transaction you’re on, I guess) and enthalten can be used to either abstain from something or that something is included (other than your participation presumably). And German does have entfallen, which among its several meanings can colloquially mean the same thing as fallen (to drop something). (So not quite the English flammable and inflammable, which both mean the exact same thing formally, but getting there.) In any case, Entsendung, linguistically speaking, should really be the act of not sending (deploying, posting, …) someone or, more charitably (again, at least in a linguistic sense), bringing someone back to the Fatherland.
But, it does indeed mean sending and not returning and translated into another English word I never knew existed until now, it means secondment. So, what prompted this sudden bit of bilingual illumination on my part? Admin, of course, and, even worse, European admin.
Since the middle of 2019, the A1 certificate (or “Statement of applicable legislation”) has come into force across Europe to indicate the European state an individual pays their social-security payments to. It’s supposed to be a safeguard for employees who work in foreign countries and especially those who have been temporarilyposted in those countries by their employer so they only make the payments once. And said workers need to carry this certificate around with them or face some heavy-duty fines of up to 10 000 EUR if they get caught in some sting operation.
So what does this all have to do with me? Well, quite literally, it should be nothing really, but reality has its own opinions.
In filling out the application recently for a business trip on behalf of the University of Not-Bielefeld (which sounds a lot better than just going to a scientific meeting), there was this “new” requirement: for all international business trips within Europe, an accompanying application for an Entsendebescheinigung (i.e., the A1 certificate) also had to be filled out. (Now, I say “new”, but, as I said, the legislation has been around since mid-2019 and, somewhat embarrassingly, the statement about secondment requirement has also been on the form since about the same time. I just hadn’t noticed it until now. And I would have continued happily not noticing it except that one of my doctoral students questioned me about it for her own application for the same conference. Shows you how well I read through forms. Or, given that I have ignored it until now, how well the crosstalk between the admin-types here at the university is. Or how well I teach my students to ignore all the admin fine print.)
Admittedly, the university admin is largely just playing along with the decrees of their European idols. Nevertheless, the entire implementation of all this has all the hallmarks of really great admin.
It’s impractical
Getting an Entsendebescheinigung requires not one, but two levels of admin: the University of Not-Bielefeld, which makes the formal application as my employer and German Social Services, which officially issues it. If you thought that one level of admin was slow, a second one must make everything exponentially slower. So forget any spur of the moment meetings with colleagues outside the country unless those spurs are about two months long.
(Unfortunately, I wrote that before having applied for my first Entsendebescheinigung at the university. It is true. In theory. But the University of Not-Bielefeld has struck some sort of deal with German Social Services so that they can take care of the whole thing internally. In the end, the entire process took less time (a stunning two days) than for me to get over my shock. To paraphrase Thomas Henry Huxley: the great tragedy of Sarcasm—the slaying of a beautiful story by an ugly fact )
Be that as it may, worse yet is that the Entsendebescheinigung is country-specific. If you visit (sorry, work in) more than one country on the same trip, you need a certificate for each country.
And, to top it all off, it isn’t a certificate at all but a five-page document (for each country) that, according to the rules, I need to keep with me at all times. Right …
It’s pointless
I’m not being “deployed” or “posted” anywhere. Hence my initial confusion about the word Entsendung (once that I knew what it actually meant). Even secondment means that your superiors are sending you somewhere else. And, as much as my superiors would probably like to do just that sometimes, that isn’t the case here. I’m just going to a conference. On my own free will. And partly on my own dime or at least definitely not on the dime of the conference.
It’s not even an Entsendebescheinigung
Yup. Entsendebescheinigung is merely the 21-letter “colloquialism” for the official term, which, as the official website for the German pension plan stiffly informs us, is the 60-character catastrophe Bescheinigung über die anzuwendenden Rechtsvorschriften (A1). Uh huh. I’ll stick with Entsendebescheinigung. (My suggestion: colloquialize it even more by replacing Bescheinigung with the even shorter BS. Or at least change the word Entsende, which is phonetically and analogously way too close to entsetzt (horror).)
Nevertheless the Entsendebescheinigung is here to stay and mandatory. All of which makes me wonder if Angela Merkel had to apply for the damn things as well for each and every European trip she made since 2019 in her role as the German Chancellor. (And, yes, I know that Olaf Scholz is the current Chancellor, not Angela Merkel. But most people, and especially those outside of Germany, would probably just say “Who?”)
Worse yet, the same would presumably also be true of all German soldiers (and, in fact, any European soldiers) that are stationed outside of their home country. Can you imagine the paperwork? And, more importantly, how long that paperwork will take to process before they can go and shoot someone? Think about it. So long as some unnamed foreign leader doesn’t announce the planned invasion of a European country many months in advance, the rest of Europe cannot legally send troops to help defend that country. (Especially if that country is France or Austria, both of which seem to be real sticklers when it comes to the A1 certificate. Sorry guys.) Forget the fact that the A1 certificate could double up as some pretty effective additional body armour with its five pages. If the foreign soldiers can’t produce it during a battle to indicate which pension fund they might not be collecting from in the future, then they could be barred from the “company premises”.
In any case, my plan for the future is to simply claim that I’m in the country on holiday. (Hopefully you don’t need an Entsendebescheinigung for that now too.) And if I choose to meet with colleagues while I’m on holiday, so be it. Lots of Germans, especially those from the Rhineland, also purposely head to the North Sea for their holidays, something which I personally find to be a lot more inexplicable.
Although the corona pandemic actually remains in full swing (and, thanks to omicron, swinging higher in terms of numbers than ever before), most countries including Germany are quickly shedding most of their corona-related restrictions. For instance, the train station here in Not-Bielfeld recently removed the signs indicating which side of the stairs one should use. (Fair enough. Like anyone ever paid attention to those.) Even the University here has caught the bug. Despite Not-Bielefeld currently being close to the top 10 in terms of infection rates in the country, the University just dropped its 3G requirement as well as that for FFP2 masks. Same virus as a week ago, but apparently suddenly less dangerous today so that a second-rate mask will do.
As a result, masks nationwide are happily being tossed aside as well to reveal some long sought after full-frontal (facial) nudity.
Now, in the case of most of my undergrad students, these are people that I only know with masks on. Some hair, two eyes, and a pair of sore ears were pretty much the only facial landmarks of theirs that I had to go by. From the nose on down was a complete mystery and my imagination had to fill in all the details. And now where the mystery has been revealed, my imagination turns out to have been very imaginative. And usually dead wrong.
And for some strange reason, the truth, more often than not, came across to me as more disappointing than my imagination. It’s not so much that the truth was different, but more so that I somehow expected it to be better and also to fit better to that little bit that I could see from before.
I have absolutely no idea what this all means. The simplest explanation is that I’m a jerk and is one that I’m not ready to cast aside. It could also be that my (our collective?) concept of beauty tends to focus on the eyes. At least from the neck skywards. You often hear how eyes are beautiful or the gateway to the soul. Noses? They’re much more often the gateway to snot, especially when they don’t happen to have a rapid antigen test currently shoved up them. Definitely not sexy. Mouths are problematic though because there are such things as dazzling or beguiling smiles. Like I said, I just don’t know.
What I do know, however, is that if my experience is true for most people, then the singles dating scene must’ve taken an awful hit over the past two years. Instead of waking up and thinking “Oh my God. What did I bring home last night?”, that thought probably didn’t make it to the morning after that often and instead was transferred to last night right after the masks came off …
Like most Canadians, I’ve long wondered why the US has stubbornly refused to adopt the metric system. (Which is apparently a myth: they have, but they just don’t use it. So, like Canada, except that we use it a lot more even if not always all of the time.) In a society obsessed with convenience, you think that they’d have long moved on from a system that includes all numbers except 10 as possible conversion factors.
There were, of course, the usual slew of explanations: Americans hate change (except when they have to buy the latest model of whatever (car, TV, cellphone, partner, …) with all the new features or move house for the fourth time in the past three years) or to stand up against “international tyranny” (especially on the part of France, whose only noteworthy achievement on the world stage since 1815 was getting the points in the Eurovision Song Contest to also be announced in French).
But it’s the last paragraph of the article that’s really telling:
“If I were to describe what makes America America, it’s oftentimes our cludgy workarounds that actually sometimes are less disruptive and allow us to function and tolerate the many different ways of doing things within a single country. And that’s not a minor achievement, actually, on some level, if you think about it. And it’s embedded in our political system, with 50 state governments operating simultaneously with a single national government. And perhaps on some level, it’s embedded in (sic) well in our very ugly but functional system of measurement.”
Stephen Mihm, University of Georgia
Ignore the details (e.g., 50 states or the measurement system) and this American history professor has basically described the way virtually every nation and any federalist government system on Earth functions as being uniquely American.
Or, to adopt the phrase used somewhat earlier in the article, another failed attempt at “American exceptionalism”.
I’ve mentioned before how time in Academia doesn’t really flow the way it does in the rest of the world. And not just for students in the middle of a death-defyingly boring lecture either.
It gets worse …
At a recent meeting of the profs in my department, it was revealed to us that, on average, we engage in about 30% more teaching than we officially have to do. This, of course, was seen as problematic, but not for the reason that most sensible people would logically come to. The real problem, it seems, is not that we’re overworked, but rather that we’re giving the impression by offering so much teaching that we have too much time on our hands, which could lead to job cuts in the future.
I just don’t understand the maths on this one. Overtime normally means too much work for too few people. Getting rid of even more people would mean even more overtime. Which, by their logic, would mean more cuts and more overtime until only one poor sod is left to work a 40-hour day. And weekends …
So what to do? We could do less teaching, of course, but this would mean cutting into our Bachelor and Master teaching programmes (which combined are already shorter than their North American equivalents, another gripe of mine). Instead, the solution was mindblowingly straightforward: if the University of Not-Bielefeld is not going to give us any gold stars for doing more than our share of teaching then we’ll only claim the amount that we ought to be doing. Yep, that’s right. We reinvented the concept of overtime to not only make it unpaid, but invisible as well.
Once again, the maths elude me …
A big part of the reason why we’re working overtime is because the university has been increasing student (and admin) numbers steadily over the past decade without adding much teaching staff. As such, we have to teach many of the entry-level courses in parallel to shuffle everyone on through. Having the university see that we’re no longer doing too much teaching but now only just enough can only strengthen their resolve to open the floodgates just that little bit more. Which, of course, means even more unpaid overtime and so even more students and, just like in Groundhog Day (which has an amazingly long Wikipedia page, BTW), we start all over from the beginning again, only without the chance for any personal development and so winning over the love interest in the end.
On top of that, there’s going to be a 30% disconnect in the number of teaching hours that we offer and the amount that we actually do. Forget invisible overtime. Now we’re also making normal time vanish out of existence! Would be a really neat trick, but some eagle-eyed, number-crunching admin type is going to notice the fabric of space-time slowly unravelling eventually. And hell hath no fury like an admin type when the sums of two columns don’t add up.
So …
To avoid falling afoul of any of those admin blackholes, we would have to reduce the official number of hours each course has to match the number of hours that we are claiming for it. However, this would mean that the teaching programme no longer offers enough hours for the students to graduate in time, meaning that we would have to offer more courses for us to not claim fully and the entire wibbly wobbly, timey wimey nonsense starts all over again. For the third time.
So much for perpetual motion machines being impossible …
Part of the University of Not-Bielefeld’s justification in opening up fully for teaching this semester was that the incidence of corona among students earlier this year was far lower than in Not Bielefeld generally, meaning that the University was neither a corona hotspot nor a spreader event. And, as part of its meticulously thought out programme to ensure that this continues to be the case, the University no longer requires corona-infected students to register this particular status.
The perfect, unintentional one-liner that comes from putting style above substance: the English acronym of the University of Not Bielefeld’s swishy moniker to justify opening up for teaching, and which becomes especially relevant for the coming semester where we will be fully open despite continuing record numbers of infections in Germany, works out to RIP.
I know. Another corona entry. It just seems there is nothing like a good pandemic and the associated fevers to really stir up the admin creative juices until all those clever new ideas just bubble up out of the froth.
And another form this time around too: danger-assessment forms. (Or, in German, Gefährdungsbeurteilungen. Only slightly longer and with slightly fewer spaces. Admin is a universal constant after all.) And not just any such form, but the one that was newly introduced by the University of Not-Bielefeld’s Work and Safety Office to ensure our safety while working on-site during the pandemic. Basically, for any teaching or research activities that were to take place on campus, this form had to be filled out in advance and approved by the Work and Safety Office.
I suppose that the form is supposed to be for our collective good, but it’s hard to see it as anything more than the pandemic causing the Work and Safety Office to have a sudden fit of new-found self-importance. (Either that or the typical admin ploy of trotting out a new form to give the appearance of having done something.) Make no mistake about it. Like so many other forms, and more than most, the corona-specific, danger-assessment form is exceedingly pointless. (It is also the same brilliant black is white, exclamation-point overloaded, creative masterpiece that I mentioned some time back.) When you boil this form down to its microscopic essence, it works out to agreeing to hold the on-site activities in accordance with the University’s hygiene regulations. These, in turn, are the not too inventive and now all too well known measures of masks, social distancing, copious amounts of alcohol, and frequent breaks with lots of fresh air. Do you really need central admin to sign off on this?
As it turns out, you don’t …
After only a single semester, Work and Safety realized just how many courses take place at the university and just how many forms they had to sign, if not actually read. So they found a way to reduce the admin load (or, more to the point, their admin load) by absolving themselves of the responsibility for their actions by shifting it down the admin chain. Instead of the sensible solution of having us all simply agree to obey the University’s corona-specific hygiene regulations (something that we essentially all do in the form anyway), the job of signing, and possibly reading, all the teaching-related forms now fell to the Dean of Students in each faculty. The Dean, of course, is just a normal prof, who has (been) volunteered for this particular position. Nevertheless that apparently makes them infinitely more qualified to judge whether any and all submitted safety measures adequately meet current work and safety regulations than, say, me, a normal prof who hasn’t volunteered.
To some extent, the point behind any form, and particularly for particularly pointless forms like this one is to create extra work for other people. And this one has fulfilled its role perfectly. First of all, you have to fill it out for every course you teach as well as every separate form of research (e.g., lab-based vs. fieldwork). More surprisingly and annoyingly, although you’d think it would be hard to not get the form approved (I mean, who’s going to tick the box that says that no social-distancing measures will be implemented, right?), it’s happened to me on no less than three occasions.
At the very least, it does indicate that someone is reading my forms besides me …
Strike 1: Work and Safety turned down my request to teach part of a class on campus. The class was basically about how to write and do presentations and, although I did most of the class online, I thought that it would be good for the students to do their presentations live and with a live audience. Anyone who has given a lecture online will understand why. Work and Safety, however, thought otherwise. What was particularly annoying about all this is not that the form wasn’t approved, but how I found out about the rejection. I submitted the form electronically when the whole university was in lockdown and pretty much no one was allowed on campus. Pretty much the only thing more nonsensical than the rejection itself was that it came via the interoffice mail system at a time when the university was still in a partial lockdown and everyone was encouraged to work from home unless it was absolutely necessary. As such, I didn’t discover the rejection until just before the presentations were to take place (no news is good news, right?) and far too late to do anything about it.
Strike 2: The Dean of Students rejected my application to have a Bachelor student conduct behavioural observations for their thesis at a nearby zoo because I hadn’t included what hygiene measures the zoo had and whether they were in compliance with those of the University of Not-Bielefeld. Naturally it made no difference arguing that I had no control over what measures the zoo chose to implement beyond the same ones dictated by the provincial government that the University was also following nor that the zoo was closed to visitors for the foreseeable future (= social distancing) and that the observations would be carried out outdoors (= fresh air) wearing a scarf (= mask, sort of) because of the cold. Luckily, however, copying the hygiene measures from the zoo’s webpage was enough to appease the Dean.
Strike 3: Not even one year later, the Dean’s Office refused to even accept my application to have a different Bachelor student do observations at a different zoo (= different hygiene measures = new form) because such research activities might no longer be within their realm of responsibility. Oh, and could I please check with Work and Safety to see if they are responsible or if it is indeed the Dean’s Office or if my very own signature will suffice. Right. Apart from the ludicrous notion of me filling out someone else’s form only for me to approve of what I want in the first place (and if that isn’t a definition of admin, I don’t know what is), why should I bother to check what job someone else might or might not have to be doing? If my signature is enough, why ask? It’s done. If not, I’ve submitted the form. And, in any case, Work and Safety have never answered any of my e-mails requesting help since the start of the pandemic.
Fortunately, one of the secretaries in the Institute came to my rescue and took up the call on my behalf. A mere 10 days after asking Work and Safety about the situation, they responded (over e-mail!) with the astute and informed observation derived from years of specialized, intense training that they had no objections so long as the hygiene regulations of both the University and the zoo were followed. In other words, pretty much what was on the pointless form in the first place. The request for an official signature on the official form has so far gone unanswered …
And, yer out!!!
(If only because the corona form is now officially obsolete. (Actually, unofficially obsolete. Yes, the absurd situation mentioned above has now been officially realized: completely untrained profs have now been officially “empowered” to approve their own safety protocols on behalf of admin.) Yes, despite Germany still battling record infection numbers, the University continues to stand by its decision to fully open up all teaching again for the coming summer semester …)
Since Gutenberg, the single, greatest invention to further the nefarious causes of admin has undoubtedly been e-mail. (Now spelled increasingly frequently without the hyphen for greater efficiency.) Whereas before the printing, folding, and stuffing of countless pieces of paper into countless numbers of envelopes meant time, effort, and the omnipresent threat of paper cut related leaves of absence, literally hundreds of helpless, unwilling victims could instead be reached with just a few mouse clicks.
(Yes, I know. Those who have been following this blog (hi mom) are now pointing out that I previously stated that German admin lives and dies with paper. It does. How else can you describe a system where they refer to paper-free examinations despite having to submit a signed, paper copy of the grades? Or, for instance, whereas corona has caused our Institute to (finally) accept and archive digital documents, every form that reaches our Faculty has to be printed out. The distinction here is that the paper is meant to torment us, not them. Upon their return home, the forms are usually just filed away in the appropriate drawer.
The second greatest invention, of course, has been the listserver for when even a few mouse clicks are a few too many …
Time was when the admin types had to add everyone’s address to each e-mail individually, the digital version of stuffing envelopes with carpal-tunnel syndrome replacing the paper cuts. Now you add each address to the listserver once and it’s bombs away in just two clicks!
And bombardment is really the only word to describe what’s going on these days. Concomitant with the installation of new software a few years ago that made the setting up and using of listservers incredibly easy, their use has exploded here at the University of Not-Bielefeld and so have the number of e-mails coming around. Whereas the little bit of effort involved before might have made some admin types question if sharing the information was really worth it, the current complete lack of effort makes the answer to that question an automatic yes.
And everything happens via listserver now.
I’m not kidding. I’m on at least 25 of these lists, representing a diverse swath of every digital minority in the University: all staff (ok, not really a minority), all profs, all users of the HPC facility, and then—get this bit of fine German engineering—all teaching staff in the University, all teaching staff in my Faculty, all teaching staff in my Institute, and all teaching staff in my Institute teaching bachelor courses. And on and on it goes.
Anyone can create a mailing list and they can add anyone to it. But, unlike a true listserver, the only way to remove yourself from the list here is presumably to remove yourself from life. (Which is increasingly tempting some days …)
Naturally, most of the e-mails are just form letters, sent to all with the hopes of interesting a few. (Not unlike, but somewhat more socially acceptable than spam mails.) A new twist arrived the other day though in the form of one of these e-mails that was personally addressed to me. (And so starting to resemble spam that much more.) Instead of an e-mail explicitly and mindlessly blasting everyone, here was an e-mail politely, but still mindlessly, blasting just me! Us oldtimers remember this from days gone by, where we got printed form letters in the mail where our name was printed differently from the remaining text to make it that much more personal. Of course, the thrill of this wore off very quickly for everyone over 10 years of age because even without this “helpful” hint, a form letter remains incredibly easy to spot after only one or two sentences in.
Or so you’d think …
You see, not soon after I’d read the first few lines of my e-mail and filed it in the appropriate “drawer”, I received another copy of it that was personally and politely addressed to someone else in the Faculty office. Apparently, the secretary dutifully forwarded the e-mail to our Institute (because we only need to critically evaluate e-mails coming from outside the University after all), which then through the three-step magic of technology (1. Forward e-mail. 2. Select victims’ listserver. 3. Execute.) came to bother us all over again. This time with numerous undeleted and pointless forwarding headers so that you had to read a little bit further than the first few lines to come to the same conclusion.
Fortunately, the appropriate drawer was still only a single click away …
The Blog About Fog 