my week

I've had one of the more interesting weeks of my life.

Many of you know I was offered a position at Dixie State College of Utah (name will be changing in the next few years for those confused by the Dixie bit, we'll be the Univ. of Utah, St. George). What some of you don't know is that while they tried to offer me a tenure track position without interviewing me, they found out that it was sorta against all of the rules. So instead I've been working on a one year contract with the promise that they would do a formal search. First the search was supposed to happen within weeks of my moving out to Utah but that didn't happen. Then it was supposed to happen in early fall and they even did an entirely new search for that one. Of course, faculty being who they are, the process of going through the applications took months longer than they had planned and so I finally got to interview for my job this past Thursday.

Maybe I'm letting my ego get carried away but I wasn't too worried about being offered the job based on the fact that they had already tried to give it to me (and everyone was being excessively supportive and encouraging about my chances of getting it with the formal review process). What I was REALLY nervous about was making all of these lovely supportive folks who had been reassuring me that they wanted to keep me around, regret it. I really am a fairly decent teacher most of the time (and a really excellent one sometimes) and I wanted my talk to reflect that. So I put a ton of pressure on myself to try and do a really nice and polished talk as part of the interview to the point that I was making tiny little changes the morning of my interview as I was practicing.

Here is where everything goes south of course. I normally allow my students access to my lecture slides before class so that they can print them out and bring them to class if they have a hard time concentrating while taking notes, so I printed out the final version of my talk to hand out to the audience. What I didn't do was save that final version to my thumbdrive. Yup, that's right. I opened up my talk and hit the second slide only to find that the heading wasn't quite right.

There wasn't anything incorrect in the talk, it's just that the final version was a little bit smoother and less prone to repeating information than the slides I was projecting. Oh yeah, and the slides I had up didn't match the handouts of course. The talk went fine aside from the minor differences (literally just a title on one or two slides and a rearrangement of topics for another two slides) and the fact that I went a bit over the alloted time. Everyone was very complimentary about it but I spent the entire afternoon kicking myself over the mistake with the files.

I was so ticked off with myself that my stomach even hurt. I got home that night and realized I hadn't eaten all day but couldn't eat anything even though I heated up some soup. So I went to bed in the hopes that it would all get better with a little sleep. I woke up at 2am with a raging fever and it turns out that my stomach pains were because I went and caught a stomach flu that Marius had had earlier in the week. It's the sort of flu where you feel intermittently fine and crappy but you feel like you need to die if you eat anything. As a weight-loss diet it's highly effective; I've lost five pounds in 36 hours. For everything else (like being alive) it sucks.

Of course last night an interested third party got the low down on the job and called to find out if I had gotten the call yet and I could really only muster an "oh good" upon hearing the good news. I'm sure it was highly gratifying for her, poor woman.