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.
Clarissa's Blog 
“shouldn’t behave like such prima donnas “
I think…. maybe…. that there’s some idea that when your job is in danger is precisely the time to act like a prima donna because if you act like you’re special and irreplaceable you’ll be treated that way.
I may have even read that as advice somewhere….
Sounds stupid to me, but nobody’s going out of their way to make me happy either….
LikeLike
It might just as well be true that this is a psychological mechanism of this kind. But God, is it ever annoying.
LikeLike