Now having an office that gets its heat from a radiator, I have much sympathy for Alan Jacobs on the problems of maintaining a decent office temperature. The radiator has a scale that goes from--I am not making this up--0 to a little picture of a snowflake to 1 2 3 4 5. These correspond to no actual temperature. I have it on snowflake at the moment because, if the people running the boiler decide that it's cold, my office will become intolerably hot even at that level. This is inconsequential and, therefore, maddening.

Outlook Web Access: officially the worst university-sponsored email program I've ever used. The interface is clunky and confusing (emails will open and display on the page but not be marked as "read"), replying is a pain, and the threading is terrible. Chicago also has a gmail-based option, but it does not appear to work for me.

It makes me miss the old days of Pine and Eudora. And appreciate gmail more.

Small complaints of academic life, an ongoing series:

One of my students needs to have their final grade changed. It's not a big deal (it does not involve re-grading anything) and under the circumstances I'm happy to do it. Duke has a rather stringent policy for how the changed grade must be communicated: printed on letterhead, with a bunch of information, and a real--not digital--signature. Failure to meet all these requirements means the change can be rejected. As an anti-fraud measure, it's comprehensible.

If this were really Duke they'd make you fax the letter, or send it via campus mail. But they also give you the option of scanning it and sending it via email. But surely this entirely defeats the purpose of requiring a handwritten signature on the letter. So why not just give in and allow electronic letterhead and a digital signature?

Crooked Timber on the non-tenure track faculty problem. 100% agree.

Things that annoy, application edition:

Web forms that require letters of recommendation to be uploaded as files. I do not have pdfs of them to upload. I will gladly direct Interfolio to send an email containing them, and in some (few) situations I will ask my recommenders to email them in themselves. But the alternative in this case seems to be giving each of them my login and password and instructing them to upload the files themselves. If I suggested that, they'd probably mutiny, kind souls though they all are.

On the other hand, thank you for doing everything over the internet and thus making this application cost me $0. This is the signal achievement of the last three years of job markets: I am spending a small fraction of what I used to because almost everything is online now.

I have been writing all day for the past two days, and am currently buzzed on coffee, and so have begun to wonder what's the deal with those make-one-cup coffee makers. They have one in the department office here, and they had one (another brand) at the Program last year. It's free, low-cost (presumably) for the department, and it's a caffeine delivery vector, so it's not exactly a complaint, but... do people really like coffee made this way? I've never had a good cup and I've had a number that were bad that were not even bad in the way, say, gas station coffee is bad (ie has a relation to the real thing like Bad Chinese food has to Chinese food). Or have I just not found the right blend?

Duke, being the technically-savvy place that it is, only allows new hires to sign up for benefits by

1. physically handing a copy of the forms to HR
2. mailing said forms
3. faxing them

Not really having the desire to make an additional trip during one of my days, I decided to fax them in. It's been three weeks since then, and I have yet to receive my insurance cards. Being concerned about the multiple different points at which a problem might have transpired, having only another two weeks or so to sign up for benefits, and unable to access the online system that would allow me to see if I had successfully signed up, I did the logical thing and called HR. I was told they were not sent to me because HR still has my old (ie from 18 months ago) address on file, even though everything this time around has my new address and, indeed, I've been receiving benefits information (retirement, etc) at my new address. I was told I could make sure my insurance cards got to me by fixing my address online. I noted that I had tried several different browsers on a couple of computers, and had been unable to access the site with any of them. At this point the woman I was speaking with asked which browsers I had tried. I told her. Aha, that's the problem: the HR system will only work with Internet Explorer.

...which just blows my mind. That's like being told I can only use PINE to check my email.*


*Except I always liked PINE.

With their usual efficiency, Princeton has informed me that my email account will be closed on August 2nd. Not a problem, as they offer a forwarding service for the next year, just in case someone tries to communicate with my old address. There's even a simple, easy-to-use web form that allows you to make the switch. Being the untrustworthy kind, I decided to send a test email from my gmail account to my Princeton account, to see if it would be forwarded back. Naturally it's not working--20 minutes and counting--and the email shows up in neither my Princeton nor my gmail. Perhaps the tubes are running slow today?

Complete co-sign with this NYT piece on the problems of academic writing. In this case, the need to constantly signpost everything for a reader. The author makes the point now obvious to me, though it hadn't occurred to me before, that the reason for constantly saying "I am about to..." or "I have just..." is to facilitate the process of scanning, as opposed to reading, academic output.

There's nothing I hate more than taking an article I've been working on and breaking it up to provide more 'structure,' secure in the knowledge that it will be the first criticism made should I fail to do so. (I also never provide enough, and am constantly being told to add more)

Then again, I did criticize someone's paper this year because it only got around to announcing its thesis on page 10 of 40. So I guess I'm part of the problem, too.

More or less:

You don't, of course, need to live by yourself to become isolated. When I am writing I wander in a fug all day, wake in the middle of the night – waking my wife Belinda as well – and stagger downstairs to record a thought or two. Leave the bed with my mind whirling with gorgeously formed sentences which are as evanescent as the smell of lily of the valley, and about as easy to recall. By the time I get to the keyboard their perfection (as it seems to me in my drowsy creative mode) has dissipated, and though I can catch something of what seemed a sensational formulation it is already, in that Platonic way, only an imitation of the ideal. I fiddle about, rewrite and reconsider, and go back to bed an hour later thoroughly stimulated, dissatisfied, and unable to sleep. I read for another hour. The next day I complain that I am tired, and show all the signs of it: irritability, abstraction, and a tendency to fall asleep on a sofa at any time, including when I am being spoken to.

There is nothing unambiguously agreeable about this to my loved ones, nor to me either. It is embarrassing, being thus conquered by an inward voice desperate to formulate, reconsider, construct, deconstruct, seek out the right phrase, amend it, think again. And I am only a writer of bits of non-fiction. You'd think it would be easy. Or easier, certainly, than being a novelist. I can hardly imagine what it must be like to be inhabited by many competing voices, ceaselessly reconsidering the flow of a narrative, charting the development of character, juxtaposing one thing with another. It's astonishing that novelists have any social life at all.

Via Jacob Levy's twitter, I think

An enjoyable week of bureaucratic nonsense, usually labelled "Kafkaesque:"

Had the good fortune of enduring not one but two crises this past week:

Crisis the first: I will be a VAP at Duke next year. Duke needs a copy of my transcript to prove that I graduated with my Ph.D. I received my Ph.D. from Duke just last year. The strangeness of that requirement seems odd to me, but I can accept the need for documentation even in the very obvious cases. Accordingly, I put in a request for a transcript; though the Registrar offers a web-based form, you are not allowed to make requests online; I opted to print-and-scan, as that seemed faster than mailing said form. One week later, I am informed that the Registrar cannot process my request because the Bursar has placed a hold on my account. My bursar account shows no balance. A day after emailing to request an explanation, I am told I have an unlisted balance of $18. Because I am no longer a student, and Duke's adoption of technology leaves much to be desired (see the web-based form), I must write a check--first one of the year!--and mail it to Duke.

At this point, my former department chair and all-around good guy Killer Grease Mungowitz steps in and offers to put up the $18 on my behalf, and I can pay him back when I return to Durham. He's going into the office anyway on Friday, and it should be no big difficulty for him; I send him all my student account information, everything seems set to go. Friday afternoon, he calls me to let me know that he couldn't make the payment because the Bursar decided to close early on Friday (KGrease: "it's already a long weekend, why not make it a little longer?"), indicating this in the form of a hand-written note on their office door. So I have to mail a check anyway.

Crisis the second: the postdocs at the program were housed in a separate building from the rest of the fellows. I heard through the grapevine that our offices would eventually be taken over by a different program. Having heard nothing definitive one way or another, I emailed last Tuesday to inquire, and was informed Wednesday morning that we had to be out of our offices by Thursday. (Which made me wonder: were they planning to tell us we needed to move out? What would've happened if I hadn't emailed?) To add to the difficulty, our ID cards stopped letting us into the building at midnight on July 1, which is the most efficient I've seen any college administrative program be with anything. The response to this problem was a rather muted, "well, can't do anything about it until Tuesday," which is frustrating, because the postdocs literally do come into the office every day to work. (This is surprising because up until the last week, the Program has been very on top of all logistical and administrative matters) Now, at least, I can get into the building.