This blog typically is about celebrating achievements - especially the achievements of my amazing colleagues and students. Today I need to write a blogpost about frustration. I realize these are small thing. especially in the global context - but some weeks it seems that too many small things stop us from doing big important things. Here are a few of the many frustrating things that have occurred recently.
- Hearing - I attended an important event where there was no microphones/amplification of the speakers. I couldn't hear what they were saying. I asked the people around me - and we all thought that one of the invited speakers proudly said he was either a "boozer" or a "user" or a "looser" - but in the context I am sure he said something else! It is discourteous to invite a panel of speakers to speak to a large audience and not have a microphone. Communication (listening and speaking) is a human right.
- Accounting - I have a grant that includes funds for provisions and resources. Recently I spent about 4 hours justifying and gaining approval for the purchase of a few punnets of strawberries to be used during data collection research with children. Typically I don't have funds for expenses like this and fund it out of my own money. Unusually, this time I did. I think I'll go back to funding things myself!
- Disqualification - I have had two significant pieces of work that have taken many many months to prepare that have been disqualified. One was a large grant that received very positive external reviews but was disqualified because it may include "health/medical" benefits. The other is an award for ~50 colleagues that would have been considered had someone other than me submitted it (I was a runner-up for a different award in 2022 - so the whole team's application was deemed ineligible).
- Timezones - We are about to launch an online asynchronous conference where 1100 people have registered from 56 countries/regions. Our commitment has always been to allow people from anywhere to participate fully whatever their timezone since we do not have set times for events. Today we learned that the commercial platform we have been made to use for the 2024 conference requires that everything is allocated a time and they don't have capability to run it an asynchronous event. With a week to go before the we begin - we hope that the company can enable us to successfully run a conference that is in the way we have done effectively twice before.
- Email access - I have had my email access removed from my computer and phone due to some upgrades happening across the university system. It took ~2 days for me to have free time during business hours when I was on campus for me to be able to work with the IT department to rectify it. They were wonderful.
- Illness - I have been very sick (pneumonia?) and it has been very hard to stop working with the deadlines for the ECV2024 conference, student submissions, grants, etc. There are lots of things I have not been able to do as I have rested.
