Female Science Professor has been tallying up the number of Facebook "Academic Gifts" that she has experienced in her career (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) and was mildly horrified to have dealt with over 70% of the inane situations that these gifts describe. Reading through the list I recognized quite a few myself, even in my much shorter career as a scientist. But it also got me thinking about what is not on the list. FSP supplied a few of her own, but I thought I might take a stab. Feel free to add on to the list
- Vacationless summer (All too familiar).
- Building malfunction leading to extremes in temperature (It's 58F (14C) in my lab right now. My students have had to bring their coats in from home to wear while working)
- Exceedingly slow-to-respond colleague
- Overly defensive assistants to high-level administrators
- High-level administrator who is sighted less than Elvis
- Building over-run by random conference (I swear the most recent society to hold a meeting here had a completely non-sensical name with made-up words)
- Empty hallway before 9:30 (Seriously, why am I the only one here right now... and for the last hour and a half?)
I'm sure I'll think up others.
2 days ago
All of the above (except the conf. part; we're in the poorpart of campus). First one is depressingly true. I haven't had a real summer vacation since 2001 :(
ReplyDeleteMy old lab was #2 as well. We had to stop experimenting (electrophysiology) a few times because the temp was 10C below RT... (Q10 etc.)
as for the last one...I miss my lab days for that alone. Getting to work for 8am fucking sucks...
You should make an entry dedicated to the ass-wipe sous-chef tech.
ReplyDeleteI've gone from a new-ish building (ie <50 years old) to an old-ish building (>70 years old) in my new job. I'm told over the last year alone there were two instances of temp fluctuations that warranted an independent measure with a thermometer (as opposed to the digital shit-for-brains wall-mounted thermostat)...one day showed a whopping four degrees Celsius (in the middle of November), followed by a few days in the +30 Celsius in January.
Those are great, PLS. Here's one...
ReplyDeleteEndless meetings to come with detailed plan for Project X, after which plan is completely ignored because of (a) lack of funding (b)change in administrative personnel (c) general "freeze" in project initiations (d) pure forgetfulness.