Help! I'm buried in papers and....

it's only the middle of week four.  Ah, This happens every semester.  So why am I surprised, dismayed, depressed?  Teaching is one thing.  Most adjuncts who have been doing this for a while can do it in their sleep. But, in truth, the actual "teaching-lecturing-discussing" (i.e. fun parts) of teaching take relatively little time.  You get up in the morning, dress according to the type of faculty "chic" that is popular on your particular campus, drive and park (if you can) , stroll to your building carrying the tools of your trade, and amaze your students with your wisdom.  But when you get home (few, if any of us have anything like an office on campus), the real work begins. 

I like to tell my students that whatever they do, I have to do 12, 15, 20, 30 times for each assignment.  Each assignment must be carefully crafted to provided an "exercise" that will either help a student to hone a particular skill or prove to you that s/he has learned it sufficiently for your department head to continue to hire you.  This itself takes time.  Unless you are teaching at Hogwart's, you most likely have to upload your material to your students using some sort of Academic software platform, such as Blackboard (which is what all of my schools use).  You need to be very careful and double-check every move you make or you will (as I have done) upload the assignment 1) to the wrong course, 2) to a course that ran LAST semester 3) to the wrong area within the course site 4) with the wrong end date / time or 4) without providing a link for its return, in which case the thoughtful student, ever mindful of late penalties, will dump the work in that scholastic black hole, digital dropbox, or send it as an attachment to e-mail. 

You try to assign sparingly and craft assignments that are quick and easy to grade, however, if you teach English, as I do, you find that that is nearly impossible.  Eventually (all too soon), the assignments appear and students start to clamor for their grades (not that they are interested in seeing how well they did but in seeing how you grade) and you are under pressure.  

From the first assignment to the last, the problem seems to multiple with a frightening progression that would perplex math professors and rabbit breeders all.  As you proudly conclude the grading of one assignment, four or five more are coming in.  Before you know it, you have 20-25 ungraded assignments (times as many students as you have in any given class) and then.....the long papers start to arrive.  Complicating matters are 1) students who use funky word processing programs that you can't open 2) students who upload their papers to the wrong assignment links 3) students who e-mail you to ask what the assignment is even after you have struggled to make it clear 4) you made one of the mistakes above that you were attempting to avoid but made anyway because it was 2am and you were seeing double despite being buzzed on copious amounts of caffeine when you uploaded. 

So, it's week four of the semester, and I'm pretty much glued to my computer keyboard, and the virtual pile of very real assignments is growing taller as I speak.  Anyone have a virtual bulldozer, I can borrow?