At the end of last semester, I was elected chair of a particular committee. (I had been vice-chair.) The committee has a two-year term, so I was also up for election to the committee. Because this put the committee in a tight spot, I asked the elections committee to let me know whether I had been re-elected, so that we could have our officers in place going into the summer. They said yes. Huzzah!
Well. You already can tell where this is going: Tonight I discovered that, oops, I in fact was NOT re-elected to the committee in general, and so, obviously, I can’t be chair. Talk about your mixed bag:
- It’s frustrating. This is going to be an interesting year on this particular committee, with initiatives that are directly related to my skillset, and I won’t really get a say.
- It’s embarrassing. It’s not like the committee leadership elections were secret, and so I’d been approached all summer by various administrators about plans for the fall. (Worse, I may actually have to continue to meet with these people until the committee sits and can elect a proper chair.)
- On the third hand, hey look–free time! And lots of it!
Frothy McBaldman | 28-Aug-07 at 1:42 pm | Permalink
You are a better man than I. Were I asked to assume a lame-duck, make-believe chairmanship for the sake of spinning the wheel so a committee could get its act together, I don’t know that I could be quite so civil about it.
jbj | 28-Aug-07 at 7:05 pm | Permalink
No pseudonym.
The thing is, I of course didn’t know it was lame duck at the time–it’s a retroactive lame-duck sort of thing. *Sigh.*
Frothy McBaldman | 29-Aug-07 at 4:17 am | Permalink
Even so, I think (at best) I would hand a committee member a folder fulla notes and head for the hills. That of course assumes I was feeling gracious at the moment of the hand-off.
And eventually I hope to collapse beneath the weight of all my pseudonyms, forcing people to point at me like Donald Sutherland in Invasion Body Snatchers.