busbus wrote in
:

On Aug 11, 2:07*pm, Han wrote:

Teaching 6 periods rather than 5 is a 20% increase in teaching load,
right? *I'd be upset about that too, if my take home pay was cut on
top of that. *And as an "exempt" employee at a university, I know a
little about staying late, and working weekends etc.



Hans,

The 20% increase in workload is not the point. I guess I was focusing
on all the down time they have now. Until this came up in the
negotiations and it was made public, I never in a million years would
have thought that they only worked a little over 50% of the school
day. They say they need that time to grade papers and exams and
homework and such. I understand. Really. I do. But I don't know of
any other profession who is given that amount of "free time" at work.

And I sort of hate to say it but I know a number of people who work at
colleges. Two of them were fellow employees back in the day when I
was laid off--they were laid off, too, during the same downturn and we
were all int he same IT group. They say it is like they died and went
to heaven working at a college. The one guy said the most stress he
has is whenever payroll runs an he is in charge of payroll. He has
had exactly zero production problems in almost eight years in
payroll. The most stress he has is whenever he has keep an eye on the
jobs over weekends. if that is the limit to his stress, please, give
it to me.

I will trade you a year here, Han, for a year in your university. I
don't think you have been called while you were on the beach and had
to cut it short to go back and log into work for hours very often. or
called at all hours of the night because the system crashed, worked
3-4 hours, then had to go to work the next day at normal time
(probably due to the crash). I don't think I worked an eight hour day
in many years, let alone a 40-hour week!

I have no idea what kind of work you do. Please tell me a little, or a
lot grin.

Been there, done that. I never had a teaching job (students that is,
perhaps unfortunately). I had to formulate a hypothesis, design
experiments, run the experiments, calculate and interpret the data, and
write the scientific papers. And in order to get the grant money, I had
to write the grants. No grants, no job. Luckily, I only had 1 or 2
times that there wasn't enough money for my salary. And then there were
the scientific conferences were you had to present the data, be nice to
the people who might judge you and so on, and still keep your integrity.
Most years I wasn't home to take my wife out for our anniversary
because of that. But I liked the work, despite the frustrations and
hard work, and hope I contributed. I'm still assisting my old
colleagues with this and that from home, but no more filling out those
effing forms and doing those proficiency and compliance tests. My old
boss is still doing this. I owe much to him and his liking of my work.
I also had a technician to help me much of the time, and they all were
very competent and nice, and got paid less, some much less, others not
so much less (seniority pays).

But I do know I lived in a protected world, generally. Of course, if my
boss and I had failed at some point to generate enough grant money, the
university would nicely say thanks to me, and send me on my way.
Happened many times, both with competent and with not too competent
people. The luck of the dr.aw. If your grant was judged by someone who
didn't like your ideas, you were done until you could rewrite the grant,
perhaps getting it to someone who liked it better. Generally in the
times I was submitting, there was 1 main reviewer of your grant, 2 who
would look at it, and then a bunch who would read the summary and judge
what the others were saying.

As for the wimps that are supposed to support your work in the
university's offices, many are nice people who had reached their Peter
principle level. Others are worse, and still others do a good job. One
thing I couldn't stand was the increasingly complex forms and
permissions, certifications and compliance testing. Seemed like every 3
months the forms needed to be changed and the required language in the
forms was redone. I still get the emails announcing the improved redone
forms etc. Now I can plonk them, and occasionally I write back telling
them why I quit.

--
Best regards
Han
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