Have a Nice Day, Unless You Made Other Plans

Weird title, huh? I actually saw that on a church sign this morning. It doesn't really make sense. Who plans to not have a nice day? Sometimes bad days just happen. Which leads me to a little story of work. I don't plan to have bad days at work. Well recently a rather important schedule conflict came to my attention for a handful of students. They needed to take a course that we weren't offering in the first summer term, but if they didn't get it, they would not be able to progress to their next semester. Long story short, we worked very hard to accomodate these students. At first, I suggested that the school extend their deadline for progression, but there were unavoidable issues with that so it was nixed. So a 4-week course was definitely needed. Problem 2: no instructor is available. The only person is the one who teaches the online version, but the school does not do 4-week onlines. Shorten the story again: we end up creating a 4-week online course just for these students. They are agreeable. Good to go. Right?

Wrong. To this point, I have been given the berth to work out a solution. None of the higher administrators were involved. So I thought. The head of the school heard bits and pieces; just enough to have concern, mainly that the students were being forced into a situation where they may fail. So now I'm stressing pretty good, and pretty upset. I don't take work personally most of the time, but after putting SO MUCH into this problem, it was a little hard not to. Especially since we had an agreeable, positive solution and now it was turned around on me negatively. Now I have a meeting with the head of the school and my boss...Great. I'm psyching myself up to go in assertive and strong for the way I handled it. My boss backs me up. We'll see how it goes....