Thursday, April 27, 2017

Highly rhetorical questions for the end of the semester


  • If you ask me a series of technical questions in a group email, and I jump right on it and spend 20 minutes answering them, and then you ask the same questions again in a slightly different form as if I had not responded, am I going to be passive-aggressive enough not to answer this one? To remind you that I answered the questions? To wait a few days before responding to any other messages? All of the above? Yes.
  • Is there a possibility that after the 1,751st draft of something in which we have collectively moved a passage from one place to another and back again, making inconsequential language changes and fighting about the MLA style each time, I will write an email saying, in more polite language, "Do whatever you want. I don't @#$@$^ care any more"? Yes.
  • If you're sick with some kind of deadly contagious plague, is it better to stay home or to come to work and buttonhole everyone you meet to tell them, "Boy, I can't believe I am this sick during the last week of classes! I really feel horrible"?
  • If you collectively dream up a position that not even Jesus with feathers on could successfully fill, is it someone's duty to point this out? 
  • If you are in a meeting and someone is being all pouty about something, is it better to let it get you down or to declare silently, like Roger Murtaugh, "I'm getting too old for this [stuff]" and get just angry enough to keep from being depressed? 
  • Knowing the volatility that everyone has at the end of the semester, is the best reaction to remember your colleagues with affection, keep your head down, and just power through? Yes. 

2 comments:

xykademiqz said...

Hehe -- these really cheered me up!

undine said...

Thanks, xykademiqz!