Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Storytime.

Anon. 8:33 points us to the best bedtime story I've seen in a good long time, "Two-Year in Hell," by Richard Dean. An excerpt:
A pudgy, youngish man with curly blond hair walked into the room and set his backpack on a desk by the door. “What’s up?” he asked.

“Raymond’s thinking of applying for a job in Hell,” Patrick answered.

The pudgy man paused, looking at their faces to see if they were joking. After a few seconds, he asked, “Tenure track?”

“Naw,” Raymond answered. “Two-year.”

“Those can be rough. You just get settled in, you have to move again.”

“It could be converted to tenure-track after two years, though, if everything works out.”

Patrick raised his hand and said, “Which of course would mean spending more time in Hell.”

“Still,” the pudgy man said, “Tenure-track is tenure-track.”
Sweet dreams, kids.

-- PGOAT

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

According to this joke posted over at Language Log (intended for linguists, but I'm sure it translates well for philosophers), we might want to be careful about wishing for a tenure-track job in hell...

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000837.html

Anonymous said...

Isn't Richard Dean at the American University in Beirut? Yikes! Hell indeed.

Anonymous said...

Did anyone interview for the position at the American University in Kuwait? I did. Even got an offer. That would surely be a post in hell.

Anonymous said...

Dean insists, on his website, that he wrote this story long before getting hired at AUB.

Anonymous said...

Even better--there was that non-tt job at the university in the "relatively peaceful" kurdish part of Iraq!