I've been kind of busy getting Jaffa Community College up and running. I really thought it would be easy, but I was wrong. Where do I begin?

I've got union issues. I approve of unions, mind you, but even the best ones can get annoying. I've got four of them. One is for classified staff, like admissions & records people, custodians, secretaries, lab managers, etc. Their union is pretty cool, except that every time I correct the draft contract to refer to myself as "Your God, Miss Kitty," they change it to "management."

Then I've got the faculty union. First, they came from the United Auto Workers. Things were going okay until I noticed that they were trying to set up the same kind of system here as they have for grad students at UC Berkeley. I respect real unions too much to have one of mine be like UC Berkeley's, a mere fundraising arm of the UAW. We replaced them with a branch of the NFLPA. Big mistake there. Finally, some of the faculty formed their own union. They're good people, so I'm not too worried about that.

Unfortunately, I've also got a Jaffa union. Since some of my classified staff, some of my management, and about 75% of my faculty happen to be my Jaffa, this union tends to have some friction with the others. Our first Academic Senate meeting ended in a staff-weapon battle, and I'm pretty sure we aren't going to get our deposit back from the Olive Hyde Art Gallery. I knew we should have waited until we actually had our own building to hold a meeting.

There wasn't going to be a management union for a while. I asked them if they wanted one, but they seemed to think that a union to protect management from management would look strange. After the Senate thing, though, they all wanted better armor. That's not something I'm prepared to just hand out, so they formed a union to protect themselves from the faculty. This seems to be more like a Teamsters kind of union than any sort of collective bargaining union, but I'm sure things will work themselves out eventually.

Then there's money. As a school and a religious organization, JCC isn't taxed. Also, we don't have to worry about finding clever ways to scam extra apportionment money from the state the way other community colleges do. This means we don't have to pull stupid tricks like scheduling hour-long classes to be 65 minutes long just so we can get a 30% increase in our Full-Time-Ambivalent Students. On the other hand, we have this freedom only because we don't get any money from the state.

As I mentioned before, we don't yet have our own buildings. I sent a couple of Jaffa to try to capture Ohlone's office of financial aid and the registrationer, but it was a bust. Half of the people were so high that they didn't even notice. (They actually told one of the Jaffa that he had filled out his forms incorrectly!) The others were simply too clueless to surrender the place. They tried, but they couldn't seem to do it. We were meeting just down the street at the gallery, but I guess that's out now.

I'm also having trouble offering benefits. All the Jaffa get free health care. Even if that cretin John McCain wins and taxes health care, I'm pretty certain he won't tax a kitty in one's tummy. I wasn't sure, so I called his office and asked. They found the idea as laughable as I did. More, actually. Unfortunately, insurance companies are really squeamish, and once they find out we plan to use live energy weapons in most classes, life insurance costs go through the roof. I can't even get a reasonable quote on regular health insurance for non-Jaffa, who will mostly be like 50 yards or more away from likely staff-weapon discharges. I'm really disappointed with GEICO. They say they'll insure anything, but they really wont. At least I got a tasty gecko sandwich out of the debacle.

We haven't even touched IT yet. I was going to ask who wanted Macs or Windows or whatever, but after that Senate meeting, I think I'll wait. Heck, the fight started while they were talking about block scheduling. I'd lose most of my new hires if we got into a Mac/Windows/Linux argument. I'm also not sure what to do about a campus wireless network. I think students and employees should be allowed to bring their computers and other wireless gadgets from home, provided they enhance the JCC experience. Unfortunately, most of our classes (including all transfer-level classes) require OPSEC, and an open wireless network kind of wrecks that.

Speaking of John McCain, I hope he loses hard. I say this knowing full well that President McCain would traumatically increase enrollment at JCC, but I really hope Obama crushes him into the dirt this November. I realize it's odd to think that a Republican president would lead to increased enrollment in any school, but remember that (a) JCC is both a military and a religious school, (b) community college enrollment typically increases during economic downturns, and (c) when he destroys 99% of health insurance, we'll still offer a kitty in your tummy.