I’m not in the least burned out on teaching. Or research. I don’t find students annoying. Writing isn’t onerous. What I am tired of is being needed. I no longer remember what it was like to be responsible only for myself, my students, my research.
I have a colleague who has been unhappy with a table in his classroom for 1,5 years. Before that, he was unhappy with the classroom, and we had to force Scheduling to assign a very popular classroom that everybody wants to him permanently. Now he’s happy with the classroom but unhappy with the table. Photographs of every table on campus have been sent to him for months to see if he accepts one of them and graciously permits to have it stripped from its current classroom and dragged into his. The most recent batch of photos dropped yesterday.
I used to give speeches to explain that a department that’s in danger of being eliminated shouldn’t behave like such prima donnas but I’ve given up. Now I simply want to not know about the table and all the rest of it.
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