[QUOTE=Cervaise]
Hey Mouse, NOW will you contact the press about your former boss’s financial fraud?
[/QUOTE]
Motive? What does she have to gain from this? What couldn’t be better than just walking away from this all?
Oh fuck it, never mind. I can’t read anymore of these threads.
[QUOTE=Apollo’s Towel]
I won’t argue that university administrations aren’t festering piles of bureaucracy. The OP says she was research staff, though, and that’s not the same as being a regular U employee… so what you wrote above in all probability doesn’t apply in her case.
Far and away the most common situation is that research staff salaries are paid by outside grants that are administered by the U, so when the research grant money is gone, so is the job. No amount of wishing that $$$ would get transferred from the U’s billion+ dollar endowment, say, is going to keep you employed once the grant is spent.
People don’t realize it, but being a “soft money” (grant supported) researcher is essentially like being self employed: you (the PI) have to keep a continual stream of new project money coming in, or you (and the rest of the group you’re supporting - post-docs, grad students, technicians, programmers, etc.) won’t get paid. The U is there mostly to give you a place to hang your hat and to deal with the financial guff associated with administering gov’t money, and that’s it.
[/QUOTE]
While in theory you are correct, I have certainly seen motivated P.I.s pull money out of university funding to cover problems. At the beginning of this year, when the NIH wasn’t giving out any grant money until they had been awarded a budget by Congress, MANY investigators had to arrange short-term loans from their universities. Others just ran in the red for a while. Some arranged loan “swaps” with other investigators (i.e. I have money budgeted for equipment, you have some for personel - I’ll buy you a PCR machine, you pay for my post-doc). Some threatened to leave the university and take all of their future funding with them unless they were given some discretionary money now. For a motivated investigator with a long-term relationship with the university, money can sometimes be made to appear. For a closing lab with an absent P.I. (like Mouse Maven’s), probably not so much.
mischievous
[QUOTE=Ponder Stibbons]
Be reasonable. What the hell is academics and research worth if you don’t have a decent football team?
Why yes, that is sarcasm, thank you.
[/QUOTE]
On the other hand, no one’s ever paid $15 to sit in a stadium and watch a researcher vivisect a rodent.
Of course, this is also sarcasm :::
[QUOTE=Ferd Burfel]
On the other hand, no one’s ever paid $15 to sit in a stadium and watch a researcher vivisect a rodent.
Of course, this is also sarcasm :::
[/QUOTE]
Well, it would depend on the size of the rodent.
[QUOTE=asterion]
Well, it would depend on the size of the rodent.
[/QUOTE]
And whether the researcher used a chainsaw.
[QUOTE=Lamar Mundane]
No warning? Read the eleventy million other threads about her job situation. Anyone who reads these boards knew that this was imminent, even if they didn’t read her threads, there was so much information floating around here that you would absorb it through osmosis.
[/QUOTE]
Listen ,as a consenting adult if I wish to practice osmosis in the privacy of my own home then its nobodys business but my own.
Just stop being so bloody judgemental for a moment or two.
Sometimes you come across as really Osmophobic Lamar ,you really do !
[QUOTE=VCO3]
If I was picking on someone, I’d start an OP in the pit. This is just a response to a dumb-assed OP that sums up everything we love to hate about a one-note poster who always posts about the exact same thing.
[/quote]
What “we”? You got a mouse in your pocket? (no pun intended). MM may be a “one trick pony” or not, but at least she’s posting about something we can all relate to, instead of the silliness you dredge up.
Aaaah, it’s all clear now. You’re mad because you keep getting slam-dunked, so you were jonesin’ to take it out on someone else.
YOUR posts are dumb, again MM’s may or may not be about the same thing (I haven’t seen so many threads by her that it could be described as “all of the time”), but at least they are about something real, something we all face at one time or another, and are well written.
You rant against things that you don’t even understand, or bother reading or comprehending first. The “stake and lobster” thread being a prime example of this sort of muddle-headed posting.
[QUOTE=CanvasShoes]
YOUR posts are dumb, again MM’s may or may not be about the same thing (I haven’t seen so many threads by her that it could be described as “all of the time”), but at least they are about something real, something we all face at one time or another, and are well written.
You rant against things that you don’t even understand, or bother reading or comprehending first. The “stake and lobster” thread being a prime example of this sort of muddle-headed posting.
[/QUOTE]
His rants are entertaining. MM"s rants are redundant.
Actually both are redundant, but at least his are full of funny vulgarities.
[QUOTE=mischievous]
While in theory you are correct, I have certainly seen motivated P.I.s pull money out of university funding to cover problems. **At the beginning of this year, when the NIH wasn’t giving out any grant money until they had been awarded a budget by Congress, MANY investigators had to arrange short-term loans from their universities. ** Others just ran in the red for a while. Some arranged loan “swaps” with other investigators (i.e. I have money budgeted for equipment, you have some for personel - I’ll buy you a PCR machine, you pay for my post-doc). Some threatened to leave the university and take all of their future funding with them unless they were given some discretionary money now. For a motivated investigator with a long-term relationship with the university, money can sometimes be made to appear. For a closing lab with an absent P.I. (like Mouse Maven’s), probably not so much.
mischievous
[/QUOTE]
(bolding mine)
The key difference between the situation you describe and the one I was talking about was that the NIH was planning to award the money, but the distribution of cash was delayed. NASA does the same thing on a regular basis. Sure, under those circumstances it’s worth it for the university to float a loan temporarily, because they know they will be getting there money back.
That is distinctly different from the case where someone has no new grants coming in, and the old grants run out. The university has no reason to believe that it would get its loan paid back in a short-term time frame, so they don’t front the money, and the researcher has to pack up and go (or in the very least, go on unpaid leave).
Witness the example of the bloodbath in the astronomy community here in the US when NASA “decided” to “reallocate” its funding from certain long-planned missions and related programs, like the Terrestrial Planet Finder and astrobiology, to missions focusing on a return to the Moon and sending humans to Mars. Researchers were informed that they would not EVER get money that had previously been awarded, and some even had to give back as much as 20% of money already in hand. As a result, a whole slew of people - especially at the postdoc level - lost their jobs, and others were left scrambling to hang on to their positions by the skin of their teeth as they looked for permanent work outside the field. Not in one single case did the universities step up to offer financial assistance. And that is the way it usually goes.
[QUOTE=Contrapuntal]
So what? What does the likelihood of finding employment have to do with the reasons for a layoff?
[/QUOTE]
Some companies will choose which employees to lay off taking things like that into consideration.
For example, a few years back my “home” factory (I was on loan to another atm) received orders to fire 10 people from maintenance, warehousing and production. The orders, coming from the US and apparently having being written by someone who isn’t familiar with Spanish comp systems, said to fire the 10 who’d been there the least time.
That would have meant, among others, the guy who was getting married two months later and who had just been granted his mortgage and the immigrant who needed five more months of continuous employment to qualify for naturalization.
There were five guys who could qualify for “pre-retirement” (get retired before their 65th birthday, but with full pension); two who had on-the-side part-time businesses they hadn’t quite dared to go full-time on; two whose families owned another business where they knew they’d be welcome. Another one saw an ad in the newspaper for his line of work in a company where he knew the guy from HR - he completed the list of 10 names offered by the unions instead of just “the 10 newest…” (and did get the new job)
In Spain, someone who’s been with the company for 5 years gets the same severance package as someone who’s been there 35, provided that they have the same job; someone who’s getting pre-retirement isn’t entitled to anything from the company (although the company will normally chip in with a package, but it’s not required). D’UH.
Mousie: go take care of that kid and get your degree. C’mon, c’mon, you got time now! 