Bertrand Russell once said that the purpose of philosophy was to take something so obvious that nobody would question it and turn it into something so paradoxical that nobody would believe it. Academics have a similar role, only it is a little less demanding.
It was one of those rare times in mid semester when there was a lull in committee meetings. So I was enjoying a few moments to let my mind wander. People often think that professors just sit around and think deep thoughts. In fact we have far too little time to do that. We spend time teaching and grading as everyone knows. But we also spend a lot of time preparing materials for class, developing new courses, and haggling over curriculum changes. We are also involved in faculty governance, which means endless committees where nothing resembling deep thoughts ever occurs. We advise students, write recommendation letters, and often have administrative responsibilities like running academic programs, lining up faculty to cover courses, scheduling labs, and ordering texts. On a normal day there is always somebody who wants something and does not understand why you cannot drop everything else and take care of them. So the deep thoughts usually do not get thought. But if you love teaching all the interruptions, inequities and intrusions seem minor.
We are, however, supposed to do research and publish papers so, in our spare time, we try to clear our minds and ponder the unusual. This is what I was doing when my teaching assistant, Patience McGrath came charging into my office. Patience is as cute as a small town beauty queen and as feisty as a wolverine. She is just over five feet tall with auburn hair, a smooth complexion, big eyes, a slim figure and great knockers that I try not to notice any more than I absolutely have to.
"What's up, Patience?"
Her name is not really Patience. I just call her that because she is anything but patient.
No answer.
"I see. Well, you look befuddled, frustrated, upset, angry, fed up, confused…" I said trying to hit the right one.
This is how it is with women. They feel a range of emotions a hundred times more complex than men and yet expect us to identify states that we do not feel from strictly visual cues. It is like trying to come up with designer earth tones from a box of crayons with eight colors. But luck was with me and I came close enough to allow her to proceed.
"You bet I'm fed up! I was working on the faculty pages on the web site and some of the pages just disappeared."
"What do you mean, they just disappeared?"
"They JUST disappeared!"
Somehow, I didn't think this added anymore information. But sometimes you have to make progress on the emotional front before you can make progress on the problem. So I gave it a try.
"You mean that they are not there anymore?"
"Exactly!"
I thought I was making progress so I decided to push my luck.
"Could you elaborate?"
"I was working on them last week. I completed them and they were put on line. Then, I went back today to download copies to add some information and a couple of the pages were gone. They just disappeared."
"Are you sure you uploaded them?" I asked, bracing myself against the answer. As I expected, she answered with look that made feel like withdrawing the question.
"Do you have copies of the files on the machine you uploaded them from?"
"Remember that lecture you gave me about not having duplicate files lying around?" she asked in an incriminating tone.
I began to feel the sand slide out from under my feet.
"Well, I cleaned all the old copies off my hard drive after I uploaded them."
She uploaded the files on Wednesday and backups were made on Friday, so I should be able to find the missing files on Friday's backup tape. Frank Haggerty was our system administrator and always willing to help. Plus, he was a guy, so I could just tell him the problem without worrying how he felt about it.
"I'll see Frank and get him to restore the pages from Friday's backup".
Not such a difficult task. Now back to pondering the mysteries of life. What was I thinking about?