The Wheel of Academia

Sometimes working in academia feels like being on a wheel.

When the work is coming in fast and furious, it feels like a hamster wheel, when you work harder and harder and you're running frantically and getting absolutely nowhere, because the work (particularly little administrative tasks) is piling into your in-tray considerably faster than you can get through it. And the wheel keeps spinning and spinning...

Other days, it can be like it was yesterday, where the wheel is a like a horizontal fairground ride, and you're clinging onto the rim of the wheel tightly trying not to fall off. The work whizzes by at a frantic pace and you're going from meeting to meeting without pause for thinking or even breathing and you're actually getting somewhere; the wheel is going round and round and you're getting through more and more work, and you're almost dizzy with the pace of it. Then at the end of the day it spins you off, and you're flying through the air, your head still spinning with the last item of the day, that one that needs to be dealt with first thing the next morning.

I had been anticipating a crash to earth today, but all seems to have gone vewy vewy quiet...