I Don’t Work Wednesdays / Over Stimulated

Some people are so amazingly bold it blows my mind. As academics we have a lot of freedom of time. Some of us forget, however, that when you take a job you have obligations. The further you go up the administrative side of the ladder, the fewer degrees of freedom you have. This coming year a group of five people, one of whom is me, have to meet regularly to discuss issues related to the administration of a program. Four of us direct separate pieces of the program and one person runs the whole show. How hard can it be to find a meeting time? Not hard, you might say, given there is a time during the work week where none of us has a university commitment (classes, office hours, other administrative meetings, etc.). Done deal? Not for Person X. You see, Person X lives 40 minutes away from campus and likes to work from home on Wednesdays. The only other times available are well outside of reasonable working hours. I have no problem making those kinds of meetings, but I see no reason to schedule one when we have a perfectly viable time during the work week. People choose to live where they live. If you choose to live 40 minutes from Campus that’s your decision and I have no problem with it. However, if you think that your preference to work from home should rule out 20% of our possible meeting times, and in this case the only time we all are free, you’ve gone off the deep end. At my institution we are paid a “9 month salary”, which means from September through May we are expected to be able to be at work during the work week. How tough is that? Imagine, someone expecting you to be at work when you said you would be in exchange for compensation! Thankfully the person in charge of scheduling had the ovaries to tell Person X to sober up and smell the coffee.


EMS Stuff – Whole bunch of helping people off the ground who can’t stand up on their own. One was a middle aged male with a seizure disorder who had a vagus nerve stimulator implanted in his chest with a wire going under his skin up to his neck. The stimulator is supposed to minimize the number of seizures the guy has, and can be kicked into overdrive by a caregiver (by waving a magnet over it) when needed. The thing was acting goofy and was keeping his blood pressure so low he couldn’t stand up. May be the only guy in the county who has his blood pressure DROP when he gets over stimulated…