Manic Monday What's Up?

Today has been the day from hell.One of the department chairs contacted me to see what I thought about two of the PhD candidates defending his and her dissertation.  I worked with the two kids and told them both their worked lacked organization, the methodology lacked development, and their sources were not explained well enough.   Plus, there were numoerous grammatical and punctuational errors.   I said, no they are not ready to defend and I will not recommend either to defend before November with all the work they have not done over the last few weeks.  I met with the department chair, the dissertation committee chair, and the two students individually from each other.   I reminded the the dissertations will be published on the data base and will represent not only the college but also the univesity and of course our brand name.  Of course, I don't have the power to say, don't do it; however, I can go to the deans and make my case.  The chair supported me, the committee chairs, not so much.  One of the PhD candidates has a position contingent upon his defense.  I said, he isn't ready, and that's that.   They finally all agreed, and I go back to my office and am sitting there with another PhD candidate and in comes the one candidate just cussing me up one side and down the other.   One of my student workers called security; let me just say that the security was trying to tackle the guy and I was yelling don't hurt him, he is just stressed, and the deans all came running and I had to spend the next hour begging them not to kick the kid out of school.   I cried and said, we should have seen this coming.  Anyway, the deans put him on probabation, the police told him not to even come to my end of the building without one of them present…well, you can guess how like **** I felt.  He sent me an email and apologized and thanked me for keeping him in the program and keeping that off of his record.   Then the rest of the day, every staff and faculty who had heard about  it came trying to get me to talk, and I kept saying, it was nothing.   Gosh.  

Then, I bought me some pistachios and have eaten the entire bag.  

Crap.