I pondered my options. I thought about a letter writing campaign denouncing censorship and demanding a public apology. After all, if they can block my site, where the hell will it end? I still wondered who the culprit was. There’s certainly no shortage of people around here that hate my guts. My anger-management shrink said I needed to work on my “people skills.” My condition is something like Turrets. I just say whatever pops into my head and most academics don’t have a sense of humor. If I’m lucky, they will eventually ban me from meetings.

So who could it have been?

I know it wasn’t the former dean I pissed off when I kept him from deleting one of our majors. He left the university and took a position and Idaho and referred to his bosses, the Board of Higher Education, as “wacky” and was canned after a year.

It couldn’t have been the former department chair I used to call Nurse Rached, the one that stole documents from personnel files and threatened to get rid of several assistant professors if they didn’t toe the line. She got hit by a car when she was taking books back to the library and that was that.

I also know that it wasn’t those idiots on the personal committee that voted to tenure a whack job nut case because they lacked the balls to send her packing. Between the three of them, I think one of them might be savvy enough to search for porn on the internet. The other two drooling idiots can barely handle email.

Nor could it have been one of the  two morons that held a long debate about minimum standards of a program that didn’t have any students.

I’m not the only curmudgeon in this place. The academic life is really about being a conceited, undiscovered genius while pretending to be civil, and even if I’m just a little more honest than others. There are some levels I don’t even stoop to. Like one time our committee was trying to nail down the fall schedule and one colleague was in her third round of chemo-therapy. She’d taken to wearing a turban, but was still holding her own in the department. We almost had the schedule set when another colleague, the one I called Valium Queen, blurted out, “Let’s not write anything in stone, you never know who’s going to drop dead around here.”

To be continued…

Cross-posted at My Ongoing Struggle with Misanthropy: http://jimmygabacho.com/?p=925

About the Author

Jimmy Gabacho

Gabacho– according to the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy– is derived from an old Provençal word “gavach,” meaning a person from the foothills of the Pyrenees who spoke incorrectly. These days, it means “outsider,” somebody who just doesn’t fit in.

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