moving up in the world.

Ever since I've worked here, I've had this problem. We've got an online phone directory, and my details are wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. For a while I was in admin, then I was in geography, then I had the wrong phone number, wrong office etc etc etc. I know I'm a bit of an anomaly in the system, but I must've rung the phone people 5 or 6 times over the last year and a half (unsurprisingly, the've got an easy phone number to remember); I've even spoken to the big boss of the phone people, trying to get them to put my details in correctly. But every time I give them the correct details and they promise to input them, I check the directory a couple of days later to find they've inputed all new wrong details. Why would they assume that I don't know where my office is or what I do when I spend 29.4 hours a week in there doing it? Why do they feel compelled to ignore my instructions and find the 'right' details? The best I can figure is that my details are terribly wrong in some database somewhere that they have to cross-check the phone book against.

Bureaucracy.

Anyway, the last time I went through this rigmarole, I thought they'd gotten it pretty close. I spoke to the big boss of the phone people, and she said she would override all the mistakes. I checked the directory, and it was almost right. I still had an imaginary fax machine, but since no-one's likely to need to fax me, I thought I could live with it.

But last night, I looked myself up, because I couldn't remember my phone number (I don't call myself that often, and nor does anyone else). And lo and behold, apparently I'm now half way through a PhD. Aren't I clever!

Now I'm beginning to think I'm going about this entirely the wrong way. Instead of asking the phone people to fix my directory entry, maybe I should ring the scholarship people to find out why my funding's not coming through.