My last day. Anticlimactic in some ways. Some suggested I just call in sick, but I had taken some sick days earlier when I was having some foot trouble. Once that was less of a problem, I was OK with trying to finish up as best I could.
The Subordinate Professor was nowhere to be seen. I had heard she was having her dog euthanized and with a baby on the way (4 months or so along) I can only imagine how that felt. The Superior Professor was in and about as clueful as one would expect. She even brought me some work to do: I had to take some course evaluations from a continuing ed program and average the scores for each presenter over four criteria and overall, for 10 presenters. Call it half an hour’s work in Excel, but only if you know how to use such arcane features as AVERAGE(). <sigh> The Superior and Subordinate Professors both want to take a class so they can learn these valuable skills. I can’t recall *not* knowing how to do these things . . . . . Complicated financial models and “what-if” scenarios — the kind of thing that multi-million dollar investments hinge on — these aren’t.
It occurs to me that some people’s idea of “point and click” is to point at a task and click/snap their fingers in impatience while someone else does the work . . . .
I finished that task, cleared off my desk, trashed all my email, put a vacation reply on my that email address, removed my account from my computer, changed the admin password, and called it a day at noon:45. Fielded some email from folks who were responding to my farewell address or were catching up on the last few weeks of weblog entries.
No goodbyes, no “thanks for all your hard work”, no “sorry it didn’t work out,” no nothing.
I’m just glad it’s over.