And then asked him if he'd like some tea

[austin_dern]

I mentioned a while back the plans to close my department and move everyone in it into other departments based on their research preferences and department needs. For several months that was all I'd known, and I'd started worrying as nobody ever got in touch with me, even as the tenure-track academic staff and the graduate students interviewed and found new places.

So the other non-tenture-track guy in the department and I finally met with the Dean, to learn why we hadn't heard anything, and the answer's depressingly unexciting: they forgot about us. At least it wasn't ominous. And as a side benefit, the Dean offered to extend our contracts through the end of calendar year 2006, so that we have time to find a new department, get to be known by them, and stand a fair chance at getting them to hire us. (The Dean's office will pay our salary for the next calendar year, rather than going right away onto any department's payroll.)

I went out to interview with the physics and the mathematics departments, which served to underscore how unprepared I really am for a job hunt since I don't have a curriculum vitae prepared, and I didn't have any good questions to ask either department. But everyone was rather impressed with the variety of courses I've taught (since I got here I've taught every undergraduate level, including one of the courses given for people who desperately need a sciences course but don't know anything about science), and the fact of the textbook drew some impressed-looking smiles.

So, there's no actual word yet, and there were many qualifications about whether a tenure-track position would be available given the departments' future plans (both are hiring, though not explicitly in my specialties), but I'm reasonably optimistic. At the very least, I've got another calendar year before I run out of easy stuff to write about in the Livejournal, though.

Trivia: The only significant hardware failure on Gemini VI was the delayed-time telemetry tape recorder, which at 20 hours 55 minutes into its flight, broke, losing delayed-time telemetry data for the remaining four hours 20 minutes of flight. Source: Project Gemini Technology and Operations: A Chronology, James M Grimwood, Barton C Hacker, Peter J Vorzimmer, NASA SP-4002.

Currently Reading: Fur-De-Lance, Rex Stout. I've enjoyed the radio plays so much I finally started on the books.