My boss knows me too well.

[Kath]

I called a meeting of various managers at work to discuss the fact that several departments involved in the creation and marketing of new short courses were not involving Timetabling at any point in the process until after the course had been made public and applicants accepted.  Sometimes I was only finding out about courses by accident, stumbling on social media posts or seeing a yellow post-it note with a course title on it that I didn't recognise and then queried.  Some curriculum leads were creating timetables for these courses and seemed to think that they coudl just slot into other timetables with no consultation.  I said "It's really quite irritating to have someone hand you a timetable for something which just doesn't work" when my boss said "...and even more irritating when it does."  I don't think I've ever felt more understood in my life!

[JohnY]

I really sympathise with you on this Kath.
Back in the seventies I joined the staff of a government secondary school in Nairobi as a physics teacher. My immediate boss, as well as being head of physics did the school timetable. The deputy head was certainly not capable of creating a timetable, or much else for that matter. My boss Mr Rehmann, left the school for promotion and I became head of physics. I was slightly out of my depth for that but that was nothing compared to inheriting the time table. By British standards we were overstaffed but there were complications. Every one had a half day off. All our Islamic staff got Friday afternoon off. We had several members of staff who were closely related to government. Some of whom had graduated as teachers only because they were related to government. In spite of their short comings they had to be used but with only the minimum possible amount of damage to our pupils.
I was very keen that our 'best' students should be able to study physics and chemistry as separate subjects. Another complication was that some 'advanced' students did a language other than English. The top two streams had to be split and recombined in such a way that half did French and half did Kiswahili. Typically African students did Kiswahili and Asians did French.
After one year I got Friday afternoon off, the only non Muslim to do so. We prepared Students for Physics and Chemistry as separate subjects. Best of all perhaps was that our top two 3rd and 4th form classes (4th formers were the O level classes) got split into half classes for laboratory sessions.
Doing the School timetable was a mixed blessing. It was onerous. It was challenging. At first quite scary.It took about two weeks out of the long holiday. I did do it successfully and got great satisfaction from it. I also ran the school chess club. Being a bit of a nerd and playing chess I think were very compatible to doing a time table. Looking back on it I wonder how I did it.