And so, of course, tempers fray. And systems, invariably, fail.
Two days before pay day, a staff member found that his access card no longer worked. On querying it with Access Control, he was informed that he no longer worked here. Yep - somewhere between his HOD signing off the form that extended his contract, and him swiping his access card, The System had let him down, denying him access.
There are a number of postgraduate courses which make use of block teaching - the students come to Campus a couple of times a year for a couple of weeks of intense teaching, outside of which they work through material, produce assignments, and complete other coursework requirements, off Campus. Their time on Campus is scheduled down to the last microsecond, and the loss of time is simply unaffordable. And so, when a centrally rolled out system fails, denying an entire class access to a lab for an evening's scheduled - critical - teaching, the students, the teaching staff, the lab staff and the technical support staff all understandably become rather stressed. System failure, access denied.
And then, of course, we've embarked on a Big Thing, moving the entire student information system across to something new and unknown. The registration pilot threw up a few problems, which hopefully will be addressed, but a steady stream of students found their way to my door to ask where they can get their passwords for the new system. Previous passwords didn't work, no new passwords had been issued them, and they were unable to access the new system. This one, it turns out, was a communication problem - the accounts were locked, because of outstanding fees balances, but the error message did not reflect this and reported a password error. Again, a system failure, denying access.
In each case, it took a great deal of stress and shouting to get to the bottom of the problem, and - hopefully - to kick off a process of resolution (the lab access problem was "resolved" through bypassing the flakey system. Unprocedural, forbidden, but necessary to protect the integrity of the academic project - or what the managerialists like to call "core business". I've always been a fan of doing what it takes, rather than doing what is stipulated.).
In this country, we're used to systems denying access - Apartheid being the most classic example, but others like capitalism no less significant. But those systems were designed to restrict access; the systems under discussion here were designed to promote access (to the appropriate people) and access was denied through system failure. Which, I suppose, requires us to be a little more prescient, a little more vigilant, a little quicker in our response, and a lot less stressed!