Where do you see yourself in ten years? (2)
Our beleaguered protagonist shows us what he's up against.
[Part 1]
You might think I want to replace the head of department because I am consumed by ambition. Hardly. Only a lunatic would want to run a university department, even when it's not surrounded by street-to-street fighting and subject to nightly aerial bombardment.
This is a matter of survival.
I decided to make one final effort to reason with him. I went to the office of Professor Farmer — that is his name — and indulged in one of my favourite pastimes: a meeting.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“We have a meeting scheduled.”
“You didn't book it through the meeting scheduling system.”
“The system is broken. It says you're never available.”
“Then the system is working perfectly.”
You see what kind of psychopath I'm dealing with?
“This won't take long,” I said, which is a magic phrase, because whenever you hear it, refusing to believe it would mean that you have entirely given up the will to live. It is impossible to face the truth — this afternoon is now officially a write-off — and continue to have a functioning brain.
I moved further into the office and sat down.
This was not always his office. His office used to be upstairs, above ground. Those rooms are no longer safe. You never know when they'll be subject to stray bullets, errant drones, or teenagers practising with molotov cocktails. The physics department is now like an inverted iceberg. Above ground is for the 80% that is irrelevant — grad student offices, junior faculty offices, undergrad lectures — and the old labs in the basement levels are reserved for the key departmental functions — professor's offices and administration.
Farmer's office is also his lab, or one of them. Most of the lab is occupied by large rectangular lab benches, overflowing with the state-of-the-art apparatus his research group use to continuously refine our measurements of the fundamental constants of nature.
The office end of the lab has all the indicators of his status: among them his massive desk, which his research team had stolen from the university council chambers one night after being tipped off that it was due to be the scene of a seven-hour firefight the following dawn, and the comfy sofas they had rescued from the Vice Chancellor's personal meeting room after temporarily hacking the app that allowed them to deactivate the surrounding minefield.
His pride and joy, however, prominently located behind his right shoulder when he was seated at his massive desk, is the cryogenically stored body of one of our most distinguished professors, Brady Alexander. Or perhaps it was Alexander Brady? It is hard to tell from his storage capsule. Dismiss your mental image of a transparent glass cylinder, let alone Han fucking Solo in his carbonite. This thing is nothing more than a huge grey metal tank. A sticker encircles the middle, reading “Brady Alexander Brady Alexander Brady...”, which is why no-one is entirely sure which name came first. Someone had the lovely idea of painting a picture of his face near the top, roughly in front of where we assume his head to be, but we were unable to hire anyone with actual artistic talent, because all of the members of the Fine Arts School had run away to join the Resistance — I'm told there are some gorgeous anti-occupation graffiti around the city — and in the end we resorted to a felt-pen stick figure of a man.
It's probably better that way. We all assume that the experimental storage process failed, and the tank contains nothing but a dead body with freezer burn. No-one says that aloud. The first cryogenically preserved human being would be the greatest scientific achievement in this department's history — indeed, in the history of any science department on Earth — so we are extremely proud of it, and very pleased that Alexander is not due to be defrosted until 2050, when we will all be long retired. Or dead.
For now it is the number one status symbol of the head of department. It is like a shrine. Maintaining the cryogenic chamber is his sacred duty. He ensures the continued operation of the noisy refrigeration system, and every day wipes off the frost.
But I was not here to admire his phallic office decoration.
“You cannot continue to run the department this way,” I told him.
“What are you talking about?”
“You are refusing to provide food rations to staff with poor student satisfaction scores.”
“You're only saying that because your student satisfaction scores are low.”
“Everyone's scores are low. Last year we lost 18% of students as civilian war casualties, 29% due to abduction and execution by the occupying forces, and of those that were left, 62% reported being subject to at least one day of imprisonment and torture. I don't think providing more extensive assessment feedback is going to help.”
“You don't know until you try.”
“I did try. I also made sure to return marked assignments within one week, after you threatened to deny me access to the water purification system. It made no difference.”
“Have you ever thought that maybe the real problem here is your attitude?”
“You're right. I would feel entirely tranquil if only I had a death wish.”
“We think that what you need”—
“We?”
“Myself and the voices in my head. We think that what you need to motivate you to truly focus on this issue, is to make you Director of Student Satisfaction.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your goal is to improve our student satisfaction statistics to the university's agreed-upon target.”
“Which is?”
“25%.”
“That's impossible!”
“We think it would be entirely possible, if you also took over teaching both lectures and lab sessions for our Introductory Physics module.”
That was suicide! Introductory Physics was taught in the large lecture theatre, on the top floor of the Physics building. It was already an open-air lecture theatre due to a missile strike; it was only a matter of time before an entire class was obliterated in there.
I tried to protest, but the meeting was over. It was time for him to clean the frost off Prof. Alexander.
As I said, I have a plan to replace Farmer. It is now even more urgent that I put it into action.
Does he really have a plan? Is there any chance that it can work?1 Most importantly, will he put it into action, or will he be too busy preparing Introductory Physics lecture notes? Stay tuned to find out!
Click here for Part 3.
Of course there is. A probability of precisely zero makes no sense.
“ head of department”!!!