Use of empty business psychobabble in your e-mails, doesn't make them fucking professional. You aren't "touching base", you're fucking badgering me! The fact that you think your grade is surprisingly low, rather than surprisingly high, doesn't even matter anymore. Your grasp of basic etiquette is worse than your grasp of basic chemistry.I don't know what game you excelled at in middle-school, sporty, but the matches must have gone on for days if you had to touch the same god damned base 57 times. There is nothing more I can do for you.
Go touch the Dean's base, I'm not responding to you anymore.
At least they're saying "touch base" and not "touch bases." (And don't get me started on the bloodsoaked military imagery so beloved by the pencil-necked paper-pushers in the marketing department...)
ReplyDeleteTouch base =/= cover the bases.
DeleteIf one more pencil-neck says "hone in on" I'll snap.
Touch base is all you'll ever get, kid. The rest of us are going home.
ReplyDeleteIt drives me nuts. "Touch base" means you've gone off and worked independently for a while and it's time to make sure everyone is still working toward the same goals and that there are no new issues or emerging misunderstandings. It doesn't mean you've asked the same god damned question again and again and again. But they see it in e-mails from their advisors so they think it's grown-up-y talk and if they use it they are magically being grown-up-y. In his head right now he's thinking "I have been so professional and she won't fulfill my [baseless] request. She is so unprofessional. Thank god I have this paper trail I can bring to the dean to show her how professional I was about the whole thing."
ReplyDeleteBeing professional doesn't rule out also being an idiot. If they don't know that, then they haven't interacted with a lot of professionals yet.
DeleteAnybody want to predict what this kid's career will be?
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing future pharmaceutical salesman.
I had some contact with an administrator (fortunately not one of the colleagues I work with on a regular basis) who "checked in" to ask for an "update" at suspiciously regular intervals (i.e. as if he'd programmed them into some sort of management/reminder software), but never responded in any substantive way to the updates sent in response. It was, needless to say, extremely annoying, and I wasted some time writing detailed updates before I realized that all I needed was some innocuous boilerplate to send, in very slightly if at all revised form, in response to his queries.
While I realize that there's probably not really enough "administrative bloat" in the academy to save the enterprise by eliminating such positions, this experience was a pretty good demonstration that at least some administrators are quite good at making work for faculty members who already have plenty to do without getting much done themselves.
Once, after many revisions, none of which satisfied the recipient. I re-submitted my original document (without specifying that it was my original submission), and lo and behold, it was accepted. I suspect the recipient thought that I should jump through various hoops to proove he was doing his job.
ReplyDelete