Flashes of Panic

I just had one of those moments where you wish you could recall an email.

I got email from the department chair this afternoon about my role in orientation (this year, I’m one of the supposed voices of experience, on the panel of grad assistants telling the new cohort how to do well,) and she mentioned in passing that she’d noticed that I didn’t have a grade entered for this summer’s course.

Now, this made me panic a little bit. Not that the grade was missing—I know how I did in the course, and I consider the letter irrelevant—but that the department chair, who I have yet to meet, thought this was an issue. I’m intimidated by this professor’s reputation, and I don’t know what to make of the fact that she’s taking an interest in my transcript (though least hypothesis suggests simply that as chair, she skims these things now and then.)

I whipped up a quick but polite email to the professor of the summer course, asking if perhaps I’d neglected to turn in some major assignment, or otherwise crash landed in a way I might be oblivious to.

When my mail client connected to the SMTP server to send that message, it also checked in with the IMAP store and downloaded the message from the chair, saying, “Never mind, I checked with him, the grades just aren’t in the system yet.”

So I had to send another message, saying, “I just had one of those moments where you wish you could recall an email.”

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