Yesterday I received an email requesting that I attend a meeting today from 3:30 a.m. to 3:40 p.m., and said, "Dude, I don't meet with anyone at 3:30 a.m. except my pillow." So he sent a corrected time for the meeting: 3:30 p.m. to 3:40 a.m. the next day. Someone needs to figure out his scheduling software!
When people ask me whether classes have started yet I say, "No, but I have a lot of meetings," but outsiders don't seem to understand just how disruptive and time-consuming academic meetings can be, even when they're not scheduled at 3:30 a.m. Three meetings yesterday, two today, three tomorrow, each one requiring a different level of preparation. Today's meeting required me to dress professionally, but I don't even know what that means anymore. I showered, and I'm not wearing pajamas. Isn't that enough?
Given the current campus climate/budget crisis/dystopian nightmare, some of these meetings get pretty intense. Spend an hour immersed in a thick gray sludge of anger, fear, and gloom, and then emerge into a lovely sunny day with butterflies flitting among the flowers--it's like moving between parallel universes. But even the butterflies can't stop people from congregating outside for the meeting postmortem, where we prod the corpse a few more times to see whether it's really dead or just sleeping.
Sleeping gets more difficult after a stressful meeting, which is why it would make some sense to start scheduling meetings at 3:30 a.m. I mean, if we're not sleeping anyway, why not do something useful?
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