The joy of Italian scheduling

N.B.: This post was written yesterday afternoon and mistakenly save as a draft instead of published.

You may have heard the old joke about heaven and hell which employs common stereotypes about some of the European countries:

Heaven Is Where:

The French are the chefs
The Italians are the lovers
The British are the police
The Germans are the mechanics
And the Swiss make everything run on time

Hell is Where:

The British are the chefs
The Swiss are the lovers
The French are the mechanics
The Italians make everything run on time
And the Germans are the police

If often happens that such stereotypes are based on some shred of reality. Having now lived in Italy these past months, I know the one about the Italians to be true. If you don't the stereotype, similar consider this example, which is not atypical of the Italian academic system.

One of my classes meets at 8:30 every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday mornings. This week, though, the professor was not available on Monday and Tuesday (which has been nice) so the office of the canon law faculty rescheduled the classes for March 5th at 8:30 and at 9:30.

Apparently, though, they forgot to check with the professor, who is not available that morning because he has another class on Wednesday mornings. Consequently, the rescheduled classes were rescheduled for March 4th at 10:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. This change was communicated to us a few days ago.

A few moments ago we received another e-mail about these twice rescheduled classes. For reasons not explained, they are now being rescheduled for the fourth time, this time to March 11th and March 18th at 11:30 a.m.

For years I have kept my daily calendar with a pencil (I tried to move to an electronic calendar but I do not like them). Now I am especially glad I use a pencil.