Corporatization
One of our fearless administrators (and actually, she’s one of the good guys) is trying to reduce costs and simultaneously yet more importantly actually get stocks of a certain consumable into the building.
The consumable in question? Lab notebooks.
We’ve been using these rather nice notebooks that have places for signatures, page numbers and whatnot: they also come with the University crest. But the University has not been able to supply them for nearly six months. So GoodAdmin went to the supplier and found that she could get larger (as in more pages) notebooks without the crest (but otherwise identical) reasonably quickly — and more cheaply. She asked the Cage if that’s what we wanted her to do.
Yay! We cheer.
And then, MediaWhoreProfWhoGivesStudentsUselessProjects says
To tell you the truth, I think we should be spending a bit more and branding the lab books with MMB and USyd logos (other departments do) – to give the students something to be proud of, that also informs them a bit about the value of IP (intellectual property) etc etc. Am I the only one who thinks like this?
It’s taking a great deal of willpower to not write back
Yes
or even
Only if your grant pays the extra for all of us
(Pippadog: Does she even have any grants? Or is it all thirty pieces of silver from the Meeja?)
It’s this kind of lunacy that made leaving industry less painful. I can just imagine this argument from my 8 year old: Sociology brand their lab books, why can’t we?
Note added in proof: Just don’t get me started on why she needs all those things in her .sig … on an internal mailing list.