I work for a university. Over the years, you learn some undeniable truths: The sky is blue, the grass is green, and the bureaucracy is run by a bunch of sadistic fucking wankers.
The head of my department is leaving the U for a job in Canada. Our lab is very small - just Rob the Aussie, Dr. Boss and myself – and has worked closely with the DH for several years. Apparently, according to the shit-flinging bureaucrats, the Dr. Boss lab doesn’t exist any more. The U fuckers took our mail box. Everything I’ve ordered has been sent back. Experiments have gone down the god damned drain because of this. Getting anything done has been a nightmare.
“Hello, I’m calling about the Dr. Boss lab mail box.”
“Dr. Boss, he’s leaving. He doesn’t need a mail box.”
No you fucking moron. Dr. Boss is staying (as far as I know).* The DH is leaving. Pull your head out of your ass and look up “collaborator.” It doesn’t mean “appendage.”
This is fucked up. Fucking bureaucratic assholes.
*If Dr. Boss IS leaving and hasn’t told us. He’s a fucking asshole, and the bureaucrats are still shit-flingers.
Ah! Here’s the rub: I work in a building that was built as joint effort between a private non-profit organization and the U. The University thumb-twiddlers tell me that the mail boxes are controlled by the non-profit and the non-profit’s fuckwits tell me that the U is responsible for this.
Two bureaucracies. Something so evil, even Satan hasn’t thought of it.
I feel like that guy in Monty Python’s The Holy Grail: I ain’t dead yet!
Me, I was picturing the OP standing on his front lawn in a tattered bathrobe, shaking his wee fist at the retreating backs of the teenage hoods who made off with his birdhouse-shaped mailbox that he’d whittled with his very own hands.
The trick with dealing with divided authority and “It’s the other guy’s fault” is to write a nice calm letter addressed to both relevant parties (university and non-profit IP heads, for example) stating that the Dept Head only, and not your own lab staff, is leaving, specifying the amount of the grant that is funding your research, that it will have to be repaid if the research cannot be completed (as for example when material addressed to your lab is returned because they closed your mailbox and returned things shipped to you via it), and inquiring if they wish to have the repayment taken 50:50 out of their respective IP budgets. Because, say you, if the mailbox is not restored immediately, you will send a copy of said letter to the CFOs for the University and the NFP requesting that their budgets be debited what you will need to repay, through no fault of your own but owing to their incompetence in closing and refusing to restore the means by which you get your matrials.
It’s always advisable never to hit someone. But if you have to, do it in their billfold; it hurts the worst there.
[hijack]A snowplow? What’s that? I haven’t seen one of those in weeks - have you? They can take my mailbox with my blessing if they’d actually come by and take some snow, too![/hijack]
Sorry about the wandering mailbox, Mouse_Maven. Maybe you can go put a cardboard box next to the rest of the mailboxes with a sign that says “Dr. Boss’ Lab Mailbox”? Not terribly secure for lab equipment, but perhaps it’s better than nothing.
[QUOTE=Mouse_Maven]
Our lab is very small - just Rob the Aussie, Dr. Boss and myself – and has worked closely with the DH for several years.
Please write ‘me’, not ‘myself’
Why should she write you, rather than herself? You’re down there in Victoria, where they’re deluded enough to think it’s summer! And besides, her basic complaint is that they took away her mailbox, so she can’t receive any replies!
Perhaps you are trying to make a joke. But since it is not funny I must assume it is not. When one writes ‘me’, it is different to writing without those little marks around the word.
From wikipedia
Summer is a season that is astronomically defined as beginning around June 21, and ending around September 23 in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere, summer begins around December 21 and ends around March 21. Summer is defined by convention in meteorology as the whole months of June, July, and August, in the Northern Hemisphere, and the whole months of December, January, and February, in the Southern Hemisphere. The unofficial start of summer is a matter of convention: in Ireland it is as early as May 1, in many countries it is considered to be June 1, while in others it is as late as July 1. In general, seasonal changes occur earlier in coastal regions, so countries close to the oceans go for an earlier start to summer than inland ones. Summer is commonly viewed as the season with the longest (and warmest) days of the year, in which the daylight predominates, through varying degrees.
I am pretty sure that January would count as summer
It was an attempt to play on the usage of “write me” (i.e., send the speaker/writer a letter) vs. “write ‘me’” (i.e., write the word, “me”).
The comment was self-deprecating humor about us Northern Hemisphere chauvinists’ tendency to regard our seasons as universal, rather than reversed from the Southern Hemisphere ones.
Your point was a pedantic whine about proper word usage when her issue is that material she needs to do her work is being returned because the idiots who run the operation refuse to believe that she and her lab continue to exist. I attempted to play it for humor rather than give it the sarcastic response it really deserved. Get some perspective!
You appear to have all the sense of humor of Uluru. And an equally abrasive personality.
I would close with the instruction to go fuck yourself, but you’d probably find a reason to object to the reflexive pronoun there, or staidly inform me that it is not physically possible.
I always find it odd that when one says that something is not funny. The other person replies with ‘You have no sense of humour’. Rather than actually reflecting that what they said was not funny. That thought never occurs. Probably lack of brain cells.
This thread is getting no mileage except for my comments apparently.
Because you have tried to kill it with your stupid nitpicking. ‘Myself" is used colloquially in this country. How about you quit shitting on other peoples’ threads and look up the word “subjective” in the dictionary.
SO why don’t you actually comment on the OP and I will leave this thread.
‘Subjective’ has quite a few dictionary meanings. Will looking it up help me understand you?
