Month: September 2026

Tracking down digital textbooks sounds easy until you learn just how many ways it can get confusing and fucked up. Contact bookstore, contact publisher, sign off on compliance, contact professor, confuse professor because they already have the textbook in digital format but I’ve spent more than two weeks trying to get a copy of said digital textbook. Then there are the super-specialized publishers who only create content for sterile compounding. They want money before they’ll even entertain providing access to a digital textbook. I get it. But why make this so hard? Not to mention the outrageous price tags these textbooks have. Nothing is under a hundred bucks and most are about $200 to rent for a semester and then they add a fee for accessing the digital version. What the actual fuck? A fee for access? When you’ve already paid the hundreds for the book? That makes no sense except that everyone is making money except me, of course. I make less than most Trader Joe’s employees and how do I know that? I’ve worked at Trader Joe’s and I know how much everyone makes.

So now what do we have? Perplexed professor. Bitchy publisher. Anxious students. But the ones I have coming to me are almost always anxious, over thinkers. I get it, I’m one too. But the whole thing is easily solved by doing this in August. September is too late because classes started already making for a scramble. I feel like scrambled eggs. Exhausted.

And me, grouchy as fuck, not only because this job pays me shit but because I have to drive here and sit here and get fatter here in this office.

At least I won’t be in here again until next Wednesday. If I get written into the book of life that is. I’d rather not be but that’s a different topic. I hope all others in my orbit are, they want to be. I kinda don’t care except for the fact that I haven’t written a formal will so that the material things are accounted for and the beasties have a place to go if I’m not around.

Collab w faculty and learning specialists how to support a blind student through a medical coding and billing program to become a competent medical coder…my job is to track down digital textbooks, still waiting for a code for one effin book, no one seems to get that this student can’t scratch off and read a code unless it’s braille then what good would it be to cover it, he can’t read it, omg, get braille labeling on biology lab equipment, make sure I know what software the student uses for text to speech then request said software (JAWS) from IT, again, review IT software install request from last week for: lockdown browser (Respondus), NVDA, Kortext, Speechify chrome extension approval and, something else but I can’t recall

Schedule testing for multiple students for tomorrow, receive specs from faculty, review for accuracy

Digital textbook acquisition for sterile compounding, technical writing and health insurance claims courses, all different publishers, look on bookshare, bookstore, publishers

Schedule meetings with 5 new students, get all data into case management software, look at courses, accommodation areas, general disability area AIM, bkstr

Organize usability testing using blackboard ultra plus lockdown browser using NVDA by collaborating with faculty, gaining access to specific blackboard course, await response from student

Discuss emotional support animals and reptiles, yes, snakes and raise issue to leadership after using a snake as an example just yesterday