*eye roll*

(does blogger have spell check and i'm just missing it? i reeaaallly can't spell.)

i like the person who is the other secretary in this (university) office. she is the full time secretary/events person/receptionist and i am the part time secretary/graduate coordinator/keeper of all things academic. i do not particularly like that she won't leave me alone.

she has consulted me today on the following important decisions:

• the colors for the cake at the graduation reception (called me from her desk)
  
• the actual type of cake - marbled or half/half? (walked across hall almost immediately after hanging up from previous conversation)
  
• (after i said "half/half") if one half is chocolate, should the other half be yellow or white?
  
• what time should we decorate on Friday (mind you, the semester's over, half of the professors don't come in everyday and there is no particular schedule to follow. answer is: whenever)
  
• what should the student's graduate gifts say (options are various combinations of "class of 2006" "member of the class of 2006" "in recognition of the class of 2006", etc.)
  
• what time should be reception start? (she ran the one last year)
  
  

now, this woman has is some years older them i am (she has a child graduating high school), has been working here for over a year, and makes more money than i do. any one of those things ought to mean that she can independently make a decision about CAKE. part of what's annoying about this in general is that after a year (i would think), you would pick up on the flow of information within your workplace (in this case, almost entirely through the university website. anything you ever wanted to know, or at least a phone number of who to ask, on occassion. want to know when the ceremony is over and when to start the reception? look at the graduation website.).

it would seem that at her previous university job, everything was done by committee, everybody was super-huggie-friends and the whole office was decorated in pastels (after discussion with the commmittee). at this university, we each have our own desks, our own jobs to do and, yes, will occasionally have a staff meeting to coordinate the distribution of work for a certain project or ask each other questions when something we're working on has leaked towards someone else's job or expertise...

but cake? seriously?