DBD 02.19.10: CGB Happy Hour

hahaha awesome so rec’d!

I’m thinking about it.

I think I got a ticket to this. Have to make sure I get it.

Web site glitches disappointed many eager students looking to get free tickets to see former President Bill Clinton on campus next week.

Though 1,200 tickets were made available at 7 a.m. Thursday for students wishing to attend Clinton’s speech at Zellerbach Hall Feb. 24, problems quickly ensued. A campus effort designed, according to spokesperson Janet Gilmore, to increase convenience and avoid long lines ended up leaving many students frustrated and ticketless as they tried repeatedly to access the site without success.

Despite the complications, tickets were sold out by approximately 7:40 a.m., shortly after the Web site was fixed, Gilmore said in an e-mail.

Some campus officials attributed the complications to an overload in the CalNet Authentication System, Gilmore noted.

LINK

Last Friday, the administration released an interim report from its “Operational Excellence” initiative. Bain, an eminent consulting firm, is running the project for a cool $3 million. The underlying reasoning is that the campus will save lots of dough by following Bain’s recommendations. How necessary it was to hire an outside firm to do what seems to be the job of the rather expansive administration remains an open question.

The report was as disappointing as it could be. It consists of a 19-slide PowerPoint, more than half of which couldn’t be characterized as useful in the least. It took Operational Excellence four months to get to this point. Most of the useful information was pulled from databases-that is, it was data that had already been gathered. Are the Bain people hell-bent on bringing back the three-martini lunch? (There are few other excuses for a PowerPoint stating what is already known taking so long.)

From the few useful bits of information in this report, we learn that a quarter of campus staff supervisors oversee one person, and two-thirds supervise less than five people. In other words, two-thirds of supervisors are basically glorified babysitters.

It is worrisome that the campus considers some staff so incompetent that they require such a level of attention to do their job properly. Are we hiring people who can’t do what they are supposed to without having a person assigned to oversee only them? Or are we creating bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy?

Rishi, break down Mustafa’s game.

Big Game 2009-for whatever reason by the third quarter, I had been thrown out of the stadium twice. (Officer: “OK so we’re going to breathalyze you.” Me: “Officer, in all due respect, this is completely unnecessary-I’m going to blow way over the limit.”)

Sad that I was missing out on my final Big Game as a student, I slowly worked my way toward a tailgate some of my friends were crashing.

After joining them, I worked my way to a picnic table that had remnants of a solid spread. Before I knew it, I was making friends and trying to figure out if there were any lawyers present who could help me finagle my way out of my citations.

Well, there weren’t any lawyers, but there was someone else who was willing to cheer me up.

I’m not really sure how it started, but either way I was joined at the table by a 40-something-year-old woman. (I should note that her age is up for debate. I’m going to say that I think she was 46, but one friend in attendance thinks she had an AARP card.)

We were making what I thought was casual conversation. Note to the adventurous type: casual conversation for a cougar means the green light to have her hand slide onto your jeans.

From there she jumped right into kissing me on the cheek and telling me that I was cute. Not in the “Oh, your photo in the yearbook is cute” way. Nope, she meant you’re cute in the “I want to do naughty things to you” way.

She then got up and walked behind the table. With my body trembling, I swiveled my head around to see what she was up to. After making eye contact, the cougar immediately made this head bob motion, which translated to “meet me out back.” (I’m having trouble aptly describing the actual motion of the absurd head bob; if you see me strolling on campus, I give you full license to stop me and ask me exactly what it looked like.)

Let me spoil the ending for you. He fails.