Tuesday 17 October 2006

Come back to the five and dime, Bernard Black, Bernard Black

Relations haven't always been as nice as they might have between me and the bookshop this semester, in fact while I have tried to be helpful and accommodating, the bookshop has over and over proved itself not merely useless but actually actively offensive and evil, as for instance is proven by the fact that only two copies of each of the nine books for Narrative were ordered in, presumably to be fought over by the fourteen students taking that subject, as well as by the inexplicable (considering they were clearly asked to very carefully avoid purchasing this text) ordering in of the English As A Second Language abridged version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which the cover promises contains no words harder than eight-grade level. And as there is only an Angus and Robertson and a Book City in Mildura, if the bookshop cocks up it is very, very hard to work around the problem. Nevertheless all of the above problems were worked around, because I found out about them in time. And I had thought it was all sorted out by now, the second last week of classes. Today though I found out that instead of The Trojan Women by Euripides, the bookshop took it into its pretty little head to get The Phoenician Women which also is by Euripides, and also begins with "The" and ends with "Women", but I can safely say that the similarities pretty much end there. DIFFERENT PLAYS.

10 comments:

Ampersand Duck said...

God, this still happens?

When I was doing Lit at a small campus we would invariably have the wrong books arriving at the campus CO-OP Bookshop, and there would be groans and mutters all around. We'd end up photocopying chapters for each week as we waited, and I think in one case we ended up with the whole book photocopied, and the real copies arriving just in time for the end of semester.

I would have thought, ten years on, with a more computer-literate society, that those stuff-ups wouldn't happen. Obviously not!

David Nichols said...

Well, you know, it's a play by Yoori-pieds, it starts with 'The' and ends with 'Women'... three out of four ain't bad. A versatile academic would work with what they're given.

Meredith Jones said...

Exactly. Jeez Laura, haven't you heard that the new best-attribute of the Australian academic is **flexibility**?

Zoe said...

This might cheer you up - coming to
Melbourne at some stage.

How frustrating for you and poor students.

Anonymous said...

I think they do it on purpose. Either that or a generation of people taught 'whole language' (or whatever it is) reading methods are now passing on the results to the rest of us, as happened here recently when a package of UniSA exam papers labelled 'Wayville' (where the exam was taking place)got sent to Whyalla, several hundred Ks away, where UniSA has a campus. Either that or someone didn't have their glasses on.

When I was an academic I fought a short but energetic campaign to have the time and effort spent rectifying bookshop stuffups factored in as part of our documented workload. Needless to say, I failed, as I did with the washing up of the tea-room dishes.

Hmm, Beta/Blogger/Google isn't letting me use my name ... Wordpress here I come ...

lucy tartan said...

Oh we talked about the play they *had* read. And about Nietschze, Titanic, the Nuremberg rallies, Iraq, dragons, and various other interesting topics.

Anonymous said...

Does this mean the bookshop is preggers?

David Nichols said...

Until a few years ago we lived in Mincha Street, West Brunswick which has a street called Manica Street two blocks away. I am sure it's been happening for over a hundred years (the streets date from the 1880s) but it was nevertheless amazing how many people came to the door expecting 6 Manica St, rather than what they got. What was more amazing was the people who wanted to argue about it.

A long-winded way of saying, sometimes people don't read stuff properly. I have to say I am the same myself at times.

Rob said...

Kinda reminds me of discovering a copy of 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus' (or is it the other way around?) categorised in a local trash and treasure in the Science Fiction area...

Anonymous said...

Hee hee science fiction. If only it was.
So all the passengers have been saying what a bad railway it is? (only Duck will know what that is from. Or Georg. Sorry. I can't resist that quote from Thomas when something is completely f**ked.)