The Minority Report

This is why one should always invest in a domain, said the Ox to himself as he cursed Blogger's sudden inability to publish his post. Oh well, it's here now and he's got some time to burn.

For those of you who (for some Godforsaken reason) have stumbled upon this site and are wondering just what the hell I'm talking about, let me just give you a brief rundown of the situation:

From Tuesday to Thursday this week, a panel consisting of various deans and higher ups in the IT field will be visiting the faculty to conduct an assessment exercise of sorts. While some of my colleagues were interviewed privately, yesterday saw myself in the main meeting room with about 15 others. Of course, one expects them to ask the standard questions: "what do you dislike about the organisational structure?", "is there anything else that can be improved?" and so on. I decided not to open my gob (since in my current state of employment nothing I say really gets heard, and besides some of the things I felt that needed saying were already being brought up) until one senior colleague fresh from her doctorate in the UK answered one question with:

"Tak ada masalah, nak naik pangkat atau cuti belajar. Memang adil-lah."

in English, now -

"No problems getting promoted or going for study leave. It's all fair."

I raised my hand.

I told the head of the panel what had happened to me and my comrades, how it's affected our chances for tenure, research grants and the like, and to be sure I threw in the words "demotivated" and "happening now". I made sure of course, that I didn't really implicate the faculty in this (since the Dean has been trying) and that this is more of a university issue that should be taken care of if they're really serious about attracting young minds to academia.

Of course then some of the other older colleagues tried to head me off by telling stories about how long they took, which to me at least had no bearing on the matter at hand. The assessor got my point however and as we moved on he asked, "How many of you have Pentium 4 PCs?"

My hand shot up again (to the chagrin of some of the others) and I told him, "I have a Pentium 2. Does that count?"

By this time the old fogeys were trying to drown me out by telling the bloke how they use their IRPA grant money to procure newer PCs for themselves until I very succinctly pointed out that my temporary status makes me ineligible for even an RM 5000 grant, much less an IRPA. This then provoked a retaliatory "but you can always join OUR IRPA group," or something to that effect, but by then I was already seeing red.

The final straw came when I suggested the uni be more flexible about allowing industry relations, quoting two other public unis whom, by virtue of applying and getting a small 2Mb Streamyx line from TMNet, have opened themselves to receive much needed research funding and other contributions from the ISP. Yet ANOTHER old fogey then started ranting about how much FASTER our dedicated backbone is (which the astute reader will recognise as having no relation to the issue) and as before, the head assessor acknowledged my point.

I saw red, because:

1) I have every intention of spearheading my very own research, not just piggybacking on some vague IRPA research title that hasn't seen a viable result in God knows how many years, and which monetary resources go to various gadgets (like O2 PDAs) that has nothing to do with the project?

2) Just because you took 10 years to get confirmed in 1989, does that mean others have to go through the same thing? What happened to improving over time?

3) There has to be a limit to our self denial/gilding the lily. This continued delusional approach to our perceived "greatness" has to stop because frankly it's like a worm in an apple, chewing away.

Later yesterday I found out that some other younger comrades like myself had done the same thing, albeit privately. I now check my car for bombs before I enter, and make sure no one knows where I really live.

Who'd have thought I'd be living an episode of 24 in my own container*?

*container - the building I work in is a corrugated iron container, like the ones used in shipping