This is Why I Hate Checking My Email

Case, traditionally, throws pumpkins off a building on campus and calls it an experiment around this time of year. The physics department usually sponsors this, but this year decided it was too much of a logistical nightmare, and canceled it. The Physics and Astronomy Club un-canceled it. About two or three weeks into planning, I got an email from a graduate student who wanted in on the action, and offered us $250 from the Graduate Student Senate to sweeten the deal. Who could refuse?

Somewhere along the line, I got declared/assumed incompetent, and due to some passive-aggressive committee politics on the part of the graduate students, we may not have the funds we need. We may also, in fact, have three people MCing the event, and a double batch of pies. For the drop which will not happen if we can't pay plant services their exorbitant fee for setting up the drop mechanism. (They say it takes seven hours, start to finish, to set up and tear down. I simply don't see it and the dance I get from their secretary makes me even more suspicious.)

My inbox is also flooded with emails from the Committee for the Selection of Common Reading, because the head of this committee is a stupid woman who likes overly complicated acronyms. There has been nothing of substance come out of this committee yet, but somewhere around thirty or forty emails have been generated. What do they contain? Pontification about "literary merit." Speculation on which bullet point ought to go first I sent an email suggesting that hey, why don't we think about structuring the request for common reading suggestions so that it's likely we'll get books that the incoming freshmen might like to read, since the university buys those books and most of them never get cracked.

I was, of course, advocating "fluff" and "easy reading" that "wouldn't challenge" the students. Silly me, wanting to put Case's limited funds to practical use. I forgot that the selection of common reading is really just an ego wank on the part of the committee. It of course has nothing to do with the students who are supposed to be reading this book.

And the committee went back to debating the bullet points.

I think I just hate committees. This whole experience is going to end with me being a dictator of an island that is small but all my own.