This is a #rant, as I am a little bit upset today. There was a meeting at school today, for "tutoring teachers" (導師). I am one, so I'd expect the school would inform me. I must admit I did find out about it, but not the way I expected.

If you've read the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", you probably remember the circumstances under which Arthur Dent found out about the bypass planned to go right through where his house stood. I felt similarly today. I found out about the meeting when I took an elevator today which I don't take that often. In it was this announcement.

Not quite believing what I saw I took a photo and went to another elevator that I had taken earlier today. There was no such notification in it. So I went to my office and asked Thunderbird to check my mail for the keyword "導師會議", the name of the meeting. The latest emails with that term in the title were from last year. I extended the search to the mail body.

Behold! There were two emails actually mentioning this meeting. One had a list of all activities this semester. The other was from the general notification system, listing a lot of items, this meeting being the second from last. Student affairs, who are responsible, instead of sending an email to all faculty (Basically every office sends notifications about almost everything to everyone, probably to demonstrate their and their information's importance.), sent an email to the notification system, a kind of automatic distributor, which sends all kinds of information nobody in their right mind reads to everyone.

So, they took the time to print those signs and distribute them (very likely on all five campuses) in a number of designated elevators, not all of them, but were unable to send a simple email with the title "Meeting notification: tutoring teacher meeting". Had I mentioned that we are calling ourselves a "technical" university?