Taste sensation

Nectarine, passionfruit and gin smoothies are not as bad as they sound. Their redeeming feature is gin.  

British estate agents: The most unhelpful people alive?

Me: Could you tell me the total floor area in square meters?

Estate agent: We don't usually have that sort of information.

Me: "That sort of information"? You're an estate agent. Isn't this the sort of thing people want to know? 

Estate agent: We don't normally do it like that. We have the measurements of the individual rooms if you want.

Me: Well in that case, you'd be able to work out the floor area, wouldn't you?

Estate agent: It doesn't include the hall and balconies and so on. 

Me: Are you telling me that you expect people to spend upwards of £150,000 on a flat that neither you nor they know the size of?

Estate agent: We're not required to give the floor area.

Me: OK, let's stop discussing this. Can you send me the EPC? 

A short while later, the EPC arrives. The total floor area is stated on the first page. 

Numb

A student came to see me. She had "issues": depression, debt, poor attendance, four days to go till her exams, and a fifty-fifty chance of passing. After she'd left, my colleague and I were discussing whether I'd given the student the right advice. 

Colleague, wringing her hands, said, "You need to make sure you've done the right thing in case it turns out badly and you then feel responsible." 

I nodded and agreed, sensing my colleague's need to reassure herself, lest her own small part in the drama turned out to have been anything less than exemplary. While I welcome my more experienced colleague's input, I had not asked for her advice and I did not share her worries. Professional ethics dictate that I try to do the right thing for students, but the truth is that I was not suffering from any anxiety over the student's fate and would feel neither guilty nor responsible if the student ended up failing her exams. 

I do my best to help students, but do so dispassionately, and experience more or less no soul searching about it.  I'm not sure what this says about my abilities as an advisor, but I've realised of late that I spend more time than seems to be usual pretending to share other people's feelings, when really I feel nothing. 

Were does one go to find out if one is an autistic sociopath?

The dangers of living in a small town

I have a PhD student to help me with admin. The first time I met her, I thought she looked vaguely familiar, but this is not surprising given that we both spend most of our time on campus, so I thought no more about it.

One day she said to me, "Do you live in Timorous Beastie Street?" 

"Why yes I do. Do you?" I replied.

"No, but I think my boyfriend lived upstairs from you."

You may recall that the guy who, until a couple of weeks ago, lived upstairs from me was a complete tosser. I arrange my features into what I hope is an expression of pleasant surprise, and say "Oh, really? Well, fancy that". 

PhD student probably knew me as "That moaning old cow downstairs". The silver lining is that PhD student and Tosser are now happily cohabiting somewhere else, and I am enjoying the silence. 

Like-minded people

It's two months now since I started Shiny New Job - long enough to get over the shock of having to get out of bed every morning, long enough to fall behind with my PhD, and long enough to get a sense of the extent to which I like or dislike it. 

It's certainly not my dream job. There are parts I don't mind and aspects that will become easier and more enjoyable as I get used to them. But I don't get that warm sense of belonging that comes from being relaxed and among like-minded people. This "not really me" element mostly relates to the fact that although it's a university, where avuncular types in nice jumpers talk at length about Foucault, I'm based in the management school, and not only that but in a professional services department, where thrusting types in suits talk in slogans and appear to actually believe the kind of corporate bullshit that appears in strategy statements. 

This feeling of being a fish out of water was exemplified in a meeting the other day, when someone said "How are we going to basketise this?" I laughed out loud. No one else did. 

The new feminists

I had a video conference with people in India. The two Indian women made suggestions, answered questions and made notes. The three men remained silent for most of the discussion. One of them leaned back in his chair and looked around the room. Another played with his iphone. The sole man on the UK side made no contribution at all until the end, at which point he interrupted a female colleague to make a "joke" that portrayed her in a negative light. After the conference, UK Man explained that the failure of male Indian students to engage with their academic work could be explained by their desire to break the bonds of patriarchy. Sigh.

Extroverts

After six weeks of New Job, I'm finally beginning to find my feet. I can now stop going to meetings that someone else has scheduled for me, but which have no obvious purpose, and start taking a degree of control over what I do. 

I'm also beginning to fear that my boss and I aren't going to see eye to eye. While I generally subscribe to the view that the best teams are those in which the members have different strengths and can, thus, complement each other, I also think that this tends to come at a greater cost to the introverts who like to think before making decisions. To me, thinking before acting is part and parcel of being intelligent, and while I admire their energy and enthusiasm, I find those who barge through life leaping from one idea to the next and opening their mouths before engaging their brains quite annoying. My boss is one of those people. 

Words of wisdom for working with flighty extroverts on a postcard, please.