The Downfalls of Tenure

I have a lot of older men as teachers this semester, an overwhelming amount it seems. They are generally nice old guys but sometimes they can be real grumps...more importantly though they are easily distracted. It can happen mid-sentence too. Now I'm all for older people working and for just old people in general...but there are times when it just seems like the university is giving out tenure like it's candy. Shouldn't there be some sort of test as to the teaching abilities of these people...like how older people have to take tests a lot to make sure they can still keep their drivers license. Shouldn't we value the education of our future the same as we value their safety on the road?
My OChem lab teacher happens to be a kind (but often grumpy and cruel) older man, who gets side tracked by the drop of a hat...or the inhaling of oxygen. Anyway, the man should not be in charge of twenty-odd college age students trying to run extremely difficult experiments with little to no help or guidance...we're drowning here people. He tends to forget who he's helping or tells you he'll get to you in a second but of course gets side tracked by the next student who approaches him. You really have to hound him to get anything from him, and often times I worry that he confuses my problems/experiment with someone elses. Today he was in fine form.
It was 8 o'clock in the morning and I was already having a crappy day. I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. So with about an hour to go in the class period (a whopping three hours) I stood in line and asked him if he could help me and three other people do an IR of our crystals (an IR is an Infra-Red spectrum of our crystal that will help us to hopefully identify one of the three unknowns that they have given us in our compound). He told me he had to help this other student but he'd be right over.
10:30 comes along and I'm still waiting...albeit not very patiently. Then I start seeing him talking to other students (not the one I had to wait for) and then he's wandering in and out of his office. So I go up to him and politely ask if he'd like us to just wait until Tuesday since its 10:30, to which he responds "an IR only takes 37 seconds to run and five minutes to prepare", which I am left to assume means he'll get to me in a minute.
10:45 comes crawling along (and by this time I'm really anxious to get home and take that necessary shower that I skipped this morning before I have to head off to my next class). A TA approaches him and at 10:50 he finally comes over and tells me we'll do the IR. Then we spend 5 minutes in his office looking for something he's inevitably misplaced. Then get to the room with the IR and have to watch him flounder around for another few minutes and yell at someone else for misplacing a different peice of apparatus he needs...only to concede that we can't do it today because he can't find all the things he needs. Then the three of us get to listen to him explain how the IR works (which we were already lectured on for two hours before) and it's painful. He looses his place in the conversation three or four times, and this guy standing next to me is getting just a little bit too close (there was touching) and so I'm just about ready to throw in the towel and my professor says "well, I guess we'll just have to do this next week. Sorry".
"Sorry"? He's got to be kidding me. He just wasted an hour of my time, when I already knew we should do it next week. Oh well...old men cannot be helped.
Anyway, the day pretty much got worse from there. A tenant called asking if she could get a parking pass because she's had several tickets and thinks they're going to boot her car. This wasn't a good time for me because I needed to take a shower and get ready for the day. After asking me to just drop the pass off at her apartment, which I told her we're not allowed to do (trying to keep the shock at her audacity out of my voice) finally told her if she could get here in 20 minutes like she said I'd give her a pass. So I take a record winning short shower and throw some clothes on to be presentable. She never shows! I waited for her and didn't do what I wanted to do with my brief, precious, moments of time between class, work and all that other crap so that she wouldn't get yet another ticket. Then an hour and a half later I had to leave to go to class. If she came over after that I feel bad for her but really I was there when she said she'd be there. Besides...who doesn't try to get a pass after the first ticket?
My gosh...I feel a very strong need to quote Michel from Gilmore Girls "people are particularly stupid today, I cannot talk to any more of them".