ScienceWoman is a first-year assistant professor in -ology. She blogs about the intersection of science and real life - primarily based on her first-hand experiences. Her older posts can be found 
Alice Pawley is an assistant professor of 
Yeah, yeah, why is she blogging about Thursday, when it's already Friday?
Well, folks, it's gonna take me more than one night's sleep to lower the cortisol levels that shot up in my body yesterday. Lemme share the highlights.
- An 8 am meeting with the dean.
- A meeting in which the dean turned the whole organizational structure of the department inside out and left some of us wondering about our professional futures at Mystery U. I'd love to say more, but I think it's probably unbloggable for now.
- An apparently missing $2000 piece of field equipment purchased with my start-up funds. 45 minutes and several heart attacks later it was found in an unopened, unlabeled box in the departmental office that apparently had been there since before I arrived on campus. (Maybe somebody should have told me about it?)
- A full-on collision between Minnow and a 3 year old on a swing. (OK, this was more Minnow's trauma than mine.)
- A frantic evening scramble to get some teaching activities submitted before a May 1st deadline passed at midnight.
- A late night check of my online bill pay and the discovery that a mortgage payment I thought I'd made for 1X00 had actually been typed as 1X,000 and was scheduled to go through the next day. A frantic phone call to the 24 hour customer service line and a stop payment was ordered on the check, but I'm still nervous.
I don't think I can handle any more days like that for a long while.
Comments
What a rough day! Hope today is much calmer
Posted by: Jenn | May 2, 2008 10:29 AM
I have TOTALLY had those days. And I think you should allow yourself to have a cortisol spike over Minnow's collision. Thing 2 fell several feet from some playground equipment when she was Minnow's age, and I still feel my heart rate go through the roof just remembering it.
Posted by: acmegirl | May 2, 2008 11:32 AM
yikes! hope today and the weekend go much better.
Posted by: Writer Chica | May 2, 2008 11:50 AM
What a crazy day!
The worst thing about cortisol is I swear there's some kind of exponential-positive-feedback-loop thing going on the.
"I know there's gotta be a break in the monotony/
but Jesus, when it rains, how it pours"
Posted by: Becca | May 2, 2008 11:52 AM
A meeting in which the dean turned the whole organizational structure of the department inside out and left some of us wondering about our professional futures at Mystery U.
I have seen more than one situation in which similar upheavals of academic departments/units have been proposed to great fanfare, scaring the crap out of junior faculty, and yet 6 months later either 1) nothing has changed or 2) there is a new and completely different upheaval supposedly on the table.
So, while one wants to keep one's head up and have job offers in hand if they are needed at the appropriate time, one also must realize that not all of these grand schemes result in the horrific consequences to one's career that one might initially fear.
Posted by: DrugMonkey | May 2, 2008 1:55 PM
Thanks for your perspectives everyone. Especially yours, DM. However, it is not reassuring to see that the tenured faculty have the crap scared out of them too.
Posted by: ScienceWoman | May 2, 2008 2:29 PM
If your dean doesn't see the importance of -ology to the future of Mystery City, he's an absolute fucking moron.
Become a consultant and charge his ass $1000 a day next decade.
Posted by: Lab Lemming | May 2, 2008 5:38 PM
I find that the more overextended I am, the more days that feel like this I have. I hope you catch a break soon.
Posted by: sciencegirl | May 2, 2008 7:06 PM
Usually, these things are manageable when they don't happen together. If it were me, the meeting would have set me up to see everything else as a disaster for the rest of the day and if I hadn't had the meeting, all the rest would have been no big whoop.
Posted by: ecogeofemme | May 2, 2008 10:32 PM
Sounds like a normal day of most Moms. . . . I am glad you are winding down. . .
Oh and the delivery. . . . welcome to my world . . . . sometimes I wonder how people can receive something for me somewhere else and not let me know that they have my things. . . . you hit one of my pet peeves.
Ciao
Posted by: Sicilian | May 3, 2008 2:41 AM