Over the past month, more than one academic friend has remarked on the never-gets-old thrill of opening her work email during the summer only to discover--nothing! No messages!! At all!!!
And, sure. That's a delightful thing. On the other hand, there are still messages one might hope or expect to find in one's work email, even during the summer. And opening up the account only to find nothing there is dispiriting. At least during the semester one can always count on something new being there, and usually a something involving capital letters and question marks and the typographic equivalent of frantic hand waving.
Even exasperating and distracting missives are, well, distracting.
What am I supposed to do, here: work?
7 comments:
I love, love, love not getting emails from administrators during the summer.
Unknown:
I think I love not getting any work email. And mostly, I do. But it's at times like these that I realize how much I actually count on (mini-)distractions to fill whatever breaks I'm taking from writing or research--and maybe prolong them just a little.
I don't want a major interruption--just a few little ones now and again. (Because as I've mentioned before, it's hard being alone with your work.)
You realize you are *just asking* for someone to come along and f with you by sending you strange things to your work email, right?
If you are not careful, I will give you ways to procrastinate by putting you to work for me, for example, by answering the question: how does one pick out lamps? How many lamps does one need in a living room? How heavy do lamps have to be before one can be less worried about cats knocking them over?
Also, I just discovered what it means to type in "art deco" or "streamline" into pinterest. Egads!!!
This is truth. I am always sad in mid-May when the email faucet starts dripping, and by June, when it stops running altogether. I even miss the annoying "Boring Person You Totally Don't Care About Speaking On Campus TOMORROW" departmental emails b/c they make me feel that I am connected to a busy and purposeful enterprise to which I am even occasionally useful, even if I don't remotely plan to attend Boring Speaker's talk. Without them, I am, like, adrift alone in the world for an entire three months.
Perverse, but true. Of course, I can always go back and figure out how many of the 400 messages in my inbox can be deleted because they involved scheduling things that never happened or that have happened, but I never managed to deleted all the pre-meeting emails....
Obviously we do not work at the same university. You can have some of my random emails-- would you prefer Uni president, teaching center, women's center, internship coordinator, other women's center, IRB, or library? Also students and colleagues. That's just from yesterday and does not include the actual spam.
There's a cure for this: teach a summer course, preferably an online one. In fact, that just might have something to do with the fact that I'm procrastinating on sending out my introductory/warning email for my July class.
But I get what you're saying: it's disorienting, at least at first, to find things so quiet, where only recently they were so busy/chaotic.
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