“I hate committees.  I much prefer a nice clean chain of command.”
“Only if you’re at the top of it…”
…”Well, yes.”
– A Civil Campaign, Louis McMaster Bujold

After Panic and Paranoia’s inelegant exit yesterday afternoon, I managed to calm down and step back a bit from the situation.  Freak outs aside, there were several things that didn’t add up.

Now, it would seem that Chief did decide (rather grudgingly) to let me transfer as it was a good opportunity, and Dr. F had followed his supervisor (who for lack of any other name, we will call Salzburg) to the letter in making sure that the transfer was in keeping with university policy at large, and it’s narrower hiring-freeze-bound interpretations.  So both sides had agreed, the person approving it all had agreed…when suddenly the Dean swooped down from nowhere and put everything on hold and demanded to meet with me.

And the question that I keep going back to, is why on earth is a Dean descending to personally look into the buying and selling of  secretaries far beneath his normal purview?

Theory the First – I know, both from student experience and updated frequently by Kiki, that the Dean and Dr. F do not get on well at all.  There seems to be an embarrassing amount of workplace territorial-ism that goes on betwixt them.  Dr. F dislikes the higher ups making decisions about his department, which often go against international and visa law, without even consulting him.  The higher ups don’t like an entire department (consisting of four full time advisors…which to their minds constitutes potential revolutionary numbers) answering to the Federal Government instead of the University.  This animosity has shown itself in strange ways across the years.  In this case, Dr. F has applied for exceptions to the freeze to fill his empty position and has been repeated turned down.  But suddenly he discovers a way around it that does not answer to the Dean.  Could this be a revenge ploy?

Theory the Second – In our office, Lt. Figaro insists on appearing to be the one making final hiring decisions about the student employees under him, even though it’s Red and Lauper who open the position for hiring, interview candidates, and make the initial offer to their chosen ones.  Figaro still insists on meeting with them, normally to talk about nothing for an hour, before releasing them and congratulating himself to the entire department on discovering such a nice student employee.  One of the last girls we hired had to listen to him talk about a family member who breeds snakes for 45 minutes, before reemerging with a shell shocked expression on her face, which took all of us collectively to remove by assuring her was more or less business as usual.  Could this be a higher up version of this sort of thing?  Does the Dean wish to appear to be the person who fills the gaps in his organization?

Theory the Third – Kiki, my ear to the ground over at ISS, has passed on an interesting tidbit.  Apparently, after Chief agreed, Salzburg called up Dr. F and told him so but that the Dean had declared, “…but I’m not going to give her to you [ISS].”  The emphasis there is interesting.  Kiki also says that the Dean has at least 5 unfilled full time secretarial positions in the various departments beneath him.  Could he be trying to move me into a department of his choosing instead of ISS?

Alright, my loves, weigh in.  Do any of these seem plausible?  Any other theories?  No matter how I try to look at it, a Dean sticking his fingers into this just doesn’t make sense for anything besides personal reasons.  The whole thing smells of politics.  The problem of course, is that I’m more a less a pawn in all of this and no one is giving me any hints about which square I should move to.  Monday needs to hurry up and get here (words no mortal will ever speak again).