Juggling Badly

I feel like there are so many balls flying above my head.  Disaster threatens. 

The biggest disaster is that I expected a good old boy to be responsible for doing something, and it seems the something hasn't happened, and now it's on me, because I'm the end of the line responsible, even though I have no power over the good old boy and the thing they're doing.

I expect the good old boy could avert the disaster at the other end with a call to another good old boy, and he knows that.  But the not good old boys in the middle (me and another woman) don't have any of that good old boy power, and the good old boys don't give a [expletive deleted] about anyone but themselves.


I spent an hour and a half this Friday trying to make air reservations on the NWU required system.  I suspect that the powers that be have made a contract with the travel agency, for which the travel agency paid the NWU some money, and then the agency charges those of us who have to use their system extra fees and such, more than making up the money they put into the initial contract.  NWU gets money to play with, and it comes out of the smaller units' budgets.

Of the hour and a half, forty minutes I spent watching the "trying to search" thing try to search before I gave up and closed out, relogged on, and tried again.  I had to two that maybe five times total because it kept locking up at different stages.  While I was waiting for the initial search thing, I hopped onto a commercial travel site, found flights that would work in about 7 seconds (it took me longer to type in the parameters than for the engine to search), and those flights ended up being about 10% cheaper than what I had to buy through the system.

I had planned to teach my Thursday morning class and leave Thursday afternoon, but that seems to be impossible, because flights don't fly in the afternoon or something.  So I'm leaving earlier, and now need to change other things.