Buckeye headaches

It's been a busy week around here, which explains this -- my first 48-hour run without posting. I suppose I should pace myself anyway to avoid running out of things to talk about.

On Monday night, we had about a dozen people from the 20-somethings group at church over for a game night. (Our friends from Harding will remember our weekly game nights at our apartment after we got married.) It went well, and we're planning to do it once a month or so.

Since then, we've been spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to get things done in the monstrous bureaucracy that is The Ohio State University. Let's just say that better organization and communication are needed to effectively manage 50,000+ people.

Katrina made an interesting comment that our reaction to OSU red tape might be some latent culture shock. For the last two years in China, there was lots of bureaucracy, no doubt, but we were insulated from it. In China, the simple universal answer to a problem was to call the waiban (the school official responsible for taking care of foreign teachers and students). Thus, we did not have to get overly frustrated -- that was left to Jia Jun or Cui Qing/David. We need a waiban here!

Did those of you who started out at a smaller university (like Harding) have similar experiences when you ended up studying and/or teaching in a larger environment?