I'm sitting in my campus office clickety-clicking on the keyboard while some primitive part of my brain cowers in fear on the floor of the starship Heart of Gold and a disembodied voice keeps saying, "We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem."
How can my body be back at work while my mind feels stuck in a Douglas Adams novel? I have a list as long as my arm of tasks I must complete pronto--don't panic!--but I lack the information needed to complete them. I'm looking at a grant application on which all the dates are off by a full year, but changing them would require me to complete a massive number of tasks after I've retired. I've been given a date for the New Faculty Orientation I'm supposed to plan but have thus far received no indication that we have hired any new faculty. I need to file a final report about a previous grant but cannot get access to the data required for filing the report. And I need to finish my syllabi but I'm still not clear on exactly what I'm supposed to be doing in the new version of the first-year seminar.
Stymied by these impossibilities, I instead devote time to a piddling bit of paperwork that doesn't matter in the least: writing my annual review, a document that will be read by exactly one person (my wonderful department chair). There is literally nothing at stake: No chance that I'll be fired without cause in my final year of teaching and no more rewards available for good work. But, unlike my other projects, I have access to all the information I need to complete my annual review and so that's what I'll do. Somewhere in my extensive list of the past year's accomplishments I'll tuck away the complaint of an iconic Douglas Adams character, Marvin the morose android: "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper."
But at least the work I'll do today is mostly harmless. Not much else I can say about it.
1 comment:
Reading this totally made my day (not that there was much competition! need to explain what I do to school students tomorrow and procrastinated all day with tidying the lab instead...) have you considered going down to the university basement and checking the toilet that is labelled out of order? to see if the necessary information is provided there? (30 years I could quote a large proportion of the HHGTTG radio show verbatim, but the years have dulled my memory somewhat). Anyway, for this relief much thanks (did I just misquote shakespeare at you? if so, apologies)
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