Department Meetings In La La Land

You know, I had a post all lined up about my experiences with id Software's Doom franchise (ever since late 1994) and how I'm intrigued to see what changes the latest iteration of the game will bring to the table (since it's scheduled for release this week), but then a call from a friend before dinner prompted this little rumination. As usual, it's about work (I'll refrain from calling it a career for obvious reasons).

Since I got the news of the university's rejection, I've found myself being able to think clearer than I've ever been in the past year. Which is strange, since one would expect a certain amount of uncertainty in its place. Instead, I find that it's enabled me to put my priorities straight and make concrete plans for my future and not just fudge around waiting for a vague promise from the university.

In the past few days I've noticed that I've actually stopped doing anything extra for work. Where I usually would look out for new research topics to suggest or training seminars to implement, I'm now content to do whatever it is I'm tasked with doing well and ending there. It's as if when the news came some sort of circuit shut down on me and I operate on the essentials, but nothing more. Maybe this makes me a bad person, but IMHO there's no use in me actively trying to improve the lot of others who just don't care. For example, late this afternoon I had a departmental meeting. One of the bigwigs was advising a newer colleague of mine to quickly finish up her master's thesis and not dawdle doing unimportant things. Now ordinarily I would think this to be very good advice, except for the fact that the same person's been tasked with menial administrative and other duties that come from...the bigwig!

So where does this make sense? Was she implying that my colleague drop the "tasks" and concentrate on her masters, or did she conveniently "forget" who gave those orders in the first place? Then there's another older colleague who refuses to join the online education portal the university asks us to use because "I can't log on, and it's easier to use the departmental server." Personally I've used the system for two semesters and it's been smooth with minor hiccups. Nothing consequential. The way she went on about it, however, was as if it was running on an old Pentium-166 with 32 megs of RAM. For a brief moment I thought I was listening to my students giving their excuses. In short, the meeting quickly degenerated into a nodding and laughing together session, which will give any uninformed onlooker the impression that we're a fucking utopia.

There are other stories to tell, but they're not the point. The point being I'm sick and tired of expending my time and energy to a place that not only doesn't recognise me officially, milks me dry as well. Like I said, perhaps I'm being a lousy worker for not going "above and beyond". The only thing I can say is I do what I am entrusted to well, which is more than I can say for most of these so called educators. In the phone call I mentioned earlier my friend urged me to do something concrete soon, like get a house/flat. I used to be scared of doing that, but the time's come for me to seriously get something going for myself.

In the end, there's no one else to live for, I guess. So Doom will have to wait, and the university..will have to say goodbye (unless they suddenly do an about face which I doubt).

Later, folks.