Time for a cold beer. It’s only 5:30pm, I know, but there are extenuating circumstances. The first is that there’s a sudden heatwave. It is above ninety degrees outside. Will be doing this pattern for the whole week. Huh. The second is that I just cycled my bike really hard in that heat, coming back from an afternoon sitting in the Casbah writing a progress report on the year’s research. Happily there’s a lot to include, but it is still quite the task pulling it together, especially when it is so hot. For me, when it is very warm, concentration problems circle around trying to not falling asleep.
The third reason is that I’m clearly going a bit nuts, with several, uh, senior moments descending on me recently. I need to take a nice break and unwind before typing in all these scribbled note. Here are three of the senior moments, so you know what I mean:
(1) On Monday, since I did not think I would be able to go to the departmental colloquium (my 5:00pm two hour class overlaps with it), I opted to join the lunch group in his honour over in the faculty club. I wanted to try to understand his experimental work that he claims shows an example of a novel duality between vortices and Cooper pairs in the context of superconducting systems. I thought I could quiz him a bit, politely, over lunch. I arrived at the faculty club, was recognized as usual by the Maitre d’, who said something like “Ah, here you are, and you’re meeting with [so and so]…”. I was surprised since I was sure my name was not on the list, but then I realized that the name she gave was not the department chair (whose name is usually the one under who the lunch group is booked) and, moreover, the name she had given was somewhat familiar. Then I remembered. I had an email exchange last week about a meeting with a totally different group of people about publicity for an event I’ll tell you about later. We’d agreed on a lunch meeting. I’d forgotten to put it into my calendar (on computer and hence on my phone with a reminder). The meeting happened to be right that moment. It was a complete coincidence that I showed up at the faculty club. So I went to the other table in the room that was expecting me, not mentioning that I’d actually nearly completely missed the meeting. (I popped over to the physics table to say a brief Hi.) You know, this happening once is bad enough… but exactly the same thing has happened to me in the past at least once. I remember if happening last year, for example. Too many committees, meetings, commitments… driving me insane…
(2) Today I panicked. For some reason I thought that next week’s seminar speaker was coming this week. Today in fact. I decided that I must have gone and forgotten to book his hotel, and so I got our head departmental administrator to frantically book his hotel and pass on apologies to the bed and breakfast owners for the lateness. Frantically sent email instructions to the speaker (David B of the new blog Shores of the Dirac Sea) about how to take public transport to USC, and then started adjusting my plans to make sure that I meet him, sent email to someone to make sure he had a key to a guest office, and so forth. Then David calmly pointed out that he was supposed to come next week. I felt a bit silly, I have to say.
(3) And I’ve forgotten the third thing. Well, that’s annoying.
-cvj
I’m sure it’s relatively common, Laura!
Not sure whether this is due to being “senior” (as helpfully suggested above 🙂 ) or just us being too distracted by too many things.
Sorry to hear that your birthday was messed up by admin stuff.
-cvj
And I thought I was *the only academic* missing appointments or double-booking. Mr. Zen just got busted! 🙂
I was hoping that my B-Day would be a good day for everybody …. I did not even have time for a beer. RTP file was due two days later.
How senior is “senior” ? 🙂
Welcome to the seniors club – I always knew you would catch up with me!
Don’t worry, youngster: over the years, they get more and more frequent.
Don’t worry about it Clifford; there was a time when the words absent-minded and Professor were hardly ever used one without the other. Back in the day erratic time keeping and forgetfulness merely added to the cachet of the distinguished academic; every department had its tales of senior eccentricity. I recall the occasion when a Nobel Prize winner turned up at the lab to give a seminar but was indeed a week early. He rang his wife, and asked plaintively “where am I? and where am I supposed to be?” Once that was sorted out he took tea and biscuits, caught the train and went home. The next week he turned up and gave an amazing talk, topped off by an awesome Q & A session that completely demolished the week old gossip that he was entering his dotage.
I juggle two jobs, one of which requires me to think in Eastern Time when I live in Mountain Time. I frequently take extra shifts, which adds to the confusion. With the online job, I can check my schedule from any computer, but I always feel vaguely that I’m forgetting something, and occasionally I am. It’s that feeling of panic that I most identify with.
Oh, I’m so glad I’m not the only one having senior moments! I completely relate to the panic you describe. This year I’m teaching on a two weekly timetable and I only have classes every other Monday. Despite having this written in every diary and calendar I own, I still get stressed about having the weeks muddled up! This morning, my husband had a real panic before leaving for work as he couldn’t find his keys, only to discover he’d left them in the front door last night. This left me heartened for two reasons; a)for once the senior moment wasn’t mine and b)I thought it spoke well for our neighbourhood that our car was still there and we hadn’t been burgled!