Once upon a time, there was a smallish university.
The locale is irrelevant.
The name doesn’t matter.
Any resemblance to any persons real or imagined is purely coincidental.
The following rants are all figments of my fevered imagination. It’s fiction, fiction, fiction.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Debbie Scott
A Vale of Tears Or You Would Cry, Too…
So, she comes into my office one morning and says, “Would you be willing to take the Hex Humanities Department as part of your load?” And then she drops to her knees, walks on her knees, tears streaming down her face, over to where I’m sitting in my chair, throws her arms around me, and drops her head on my shoulder. She’s kind of shaking and then she looks up at me.
Now, the Hex Humanities Dept. had a well-earned, campus-wide reputation for being, uh, a bunch of fun-loving scamps, shall we say, and she was at her wits’ end. I guess she figured, “Let’s try handing them off to the old war horse and see what happens”.
I remember her assistant had told me she’s a lip-kisser – but she’s not a stupid woman. Loose cannon, oh yeah, bay-bee, big time, but not, as I said, completely stupid.
Don’t do it, lady.
We passed on the kiss. (I’ll always regret that. I heard later she was a really good kisser)
It was one of the most unusual experiences of my entire working life up to that point.
Because, see, how it should have gone was: she should have had her junior assistant summon me down to her office, at her convenience, and informed me that she was adding Hex Humanities to my load. Then, end the meeting by mumbling something about considering a promotion in the foreseeable future (yeah, yeah) and close by saying, “Did you have any questions, concerns…?”, slightly nodding towards the door as a signal the meeting was over.
Bada-bing. Bada-boom.
Let me put this in perspective for you:
She: Dean of College.
Me: Department secretary (academe’s code for “amoeba”).
While I’ll be the first to admit that I do scare the hell out of some people, I’d like to point out that this same Dean managed to find the cajones to call a well-respected, much-beloved, elder FULL PROFESSOR on the carpet TWICE for sending out campus-wide emails questioning why we were suddenly accruing such a pantheon of vice-chancellors.
Some years later, when I was telling the above story to a young woman, she said, “And what did YOU do?” And I said “nothing”, because there wasn’t a damned thing I could do, she had me completely pinned in AND she was the DEAN and I was, as the British say, “gobsmacked”. Gob. Smack. Ed.
My young inquisitor then asked “well, did she say anything about a raise?!” I said “No”, and she said, “Well, why not?!”
She was the first person outside of the university to whom I had told the story.
Other university staff members never asked “why not?”
When Knee-Walking-Woman left the campus to take another high-ranking position at a larger school, I was tempted to ship an anonymous box with various items, including tissues, LOTS of tissues, a bottle of eye drops, lip balm, mints, knee-pads, and a letter addressed to the hapless assistant who would be working with her.
Instead, I did like Scarlett did when Charlie went off to the war. (I cried into my pillow every night.)
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