When students pay for the teacher's mistake

I am having the worst week of my life in terms of classroom logistics. At present I am a TA for one of the most popular courses in my department. Our department policy is to drop students for non-attendance on the first day. Things started off pretty smoothly on Friday with my first section. Two students didn't show so I dropped them and told two students on the waitlist that they could take the spot. No problem, right? Wrong. I get a frantic e-mail from one student telling me that he had just been called for a job interview that day etc. etc. etc. After some back-and-forth via e-mail, I decided that he had a legit excuse and let him back in. At the same time, I got an e-mail from the other student who said that he's out of the country and not to drop me although he won't be back for another two weeks. Definitely wasn't going to happen, until he revealed to me his real reason for being out of the country, a reason corroborated by the Department (why don't people TELL me these things ahead of time???). Great, so that left me with two students whose hopes I wrongly raised, so I had to e-mail them with profuse apologies and put them back on the waiting list.

I then set up assignments for people to lead discussion each week. People sign up and then they're supposed to pair off and meet with me to plan their presentation. No big deal, right? Then one student who was supposed to co-lead discussion this week had a family emergency (yes, it was real, not a case of cold feet). So I had to scramble to find a substitute. Of course, the substitute I randomly selected just happens to live way outside campus and only comes twice a week and is only free for one 90-minute block, of which I am only free for 30 minutes. I sure hope the other guy is free then, but we'll see.

It gets better. For some odd reason I had thought that the students at the bottom of the waitlist were the first ones rather than the last ones. This seems counterintuitive but I could have sworn that I had seen those students at the bottom of the list ON the list long before the students at the top. Maybe they had dropped and re-added themselves when I wasn't looking. *Sigh*, so when I told students that they were third on the waitlist, they were really the first ones, and vice-versa. It's the vice-versa part that got me. I sent out e-mails to everyone confirming their place on the waitlist, and inevitably got one that read "You told me that I was first on the waitlist, but now I'm third. What's going on?" At this point, all I really wanted to do was just add more seats to my section, which I COULD theoretically do, IF I was working less than 75% time. Unfortunately for my students, I'm working 50% as a teaching assistant AND 25% as a research assistant. Every additional student ups my workload by 1%. If I let in that student at the bottom of the waitlist, I'd have to let in the two ahead of her, and if I open up 3 slots in one section, I'll have to open up 3 in my other section or else everyone will cry foul. I suppose that I could technically reduce my research assistantship job by 6%, but seriously, who would process that? I can just see the look on my boss's face when I announce to him that I will be working 19% rather than 25%.

So I'm screwed every which way, but my students are screwed even more. Some of them have purchased non-refundable readers (in the case of the student who got moved to last place, I offered to purchase her reader if she did not end up getting into the class). Ironically, this is a course on war, and I think I'm beginning to feel a little bit like an officer who makes a bad tactical decision and has to watch his soldiers die for it.