Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Musing over an amusing moose

At an important meeting my colleague declared, "I think we all know there's an intangible dead moose in the room," and if it hadn't been totally inappropriate I would have laughed out loud, grateful that if we had to share a small conference room with a dead moose at least it was the intangible kind, because who wants to conduct faculty governance in a room suffused with the aroma of a tangible dead moose and how would you get a dead moose up to the third floor (elevator? stairwells?) or, for that matter, to southern Ohio (by boat? helicopter? pickup truck?) and would it be better to kill the moose first or ship it live and then shoot it just before the meeting? Tragically, our Faculty Manual offers no insight on these issues.

I'm afraid the dead moose issue distracted me from some important point of faculty governance, but one of my duties as Faculty Chair is to muse over any dead mooses that get dropped into my lap--and I much prefer the intangible kind because I never know how much to tip the helicopter pilot.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The dead moose story reminds me of the "mouse suits" incident in our dept:

A faculty member was responding to an appeal to use a shared rubric to grade a shared final essay in our comp classes (no longer done, thankfully) and he complained that it was like forcing us all to wear Mao Suits.

Well, we heard "mouse suits" and could not contain our glee....

he was not amused.