In which I flip the Provost's office the bird

I'm so friggin' fed up with the Payroll/Dean's/Provost's offices BS that I've decided, with the full support of Fantastic Adviser, to walk away from the American Studies teaching job in winter quarter.

To my mind, that makes me a bitch because I'll be leaving the department in the lurch, with about a month to find someone to teach a class for which I've already ordered books. But Fantastic Adviser assures me that there will be no diminishment of the warm feelings people in the department have for me. She was so sure of this that as soon as I finished my phone conversation with her, she said she'd call the department chair and speak to him on my behalf. I'm on good terms with him, but she's closer to him. Yay for Fantastic Adviser, and yay for trillwing for deciding not to put up with the university's BS any longer.

If the course gets cancelled, I leave two TAs, both my friends, in a bad position because they may or may not have their jobs next quarter. But I'm already working with one of them to get her another job, and the other friend has a second teaching job elsewhere and had expressed interest in picking up more courses there, so I'm not too worried about him. (Another problem of my job is that I know socially pretty much everyone who was qualified and willing to serve as a TA in my courses. And as much as I like my friends, it's tough to be placed in a position where technically I'm supervising them--and then merely because I finished my dissertation before they finished theirs.)

Anyway, I'm feeling pretty good. I'll miss teaching in American Studies, but I won't miss the indentured servant wages the university offers adjuncts, nor the giant bureaucracy to which people in smaller academic departments apparently can fall prey. My new department not only has its own shuttle, but its own HR person, too. :)

Did I mention I'm also getting a Mac laptop loaded with the full Microsoft Office, Adobe, and Macromedia suites? And that I'll have a PC laptop to work with as well so that I can learn to troubleshoot problems endemic to PCs? I'm so used to using my own personal, aging laptop for teaching that the thought of being provided with TWO fully-loaded notebook computers just boggles my mind.