#6 You couldn’t wait any longer

Patience is a slow death for most, but for you, it expired somewhere between month five and month seven. Your lab renovation fell behind schedule, and you paced in front of it like a caged animal, sighing with the weight of Nobel ceremonies missed.

 

The only updates that I could convey were excuses from our trades.  I offered you no salve as I related stories about all the professors who had to wait longer than you.  The Physics Lab that should’ve taken one year to complete started fourteen years ago and is still unfinished.  The Aquatics Lab was a one-year project that took eight years to complete, and it’s still not in use because of a plumbing issue.  I said look on the bright side, this experience might help your research titled “Irritability as a Predictor of Professional Sabotage in High-Stress Institutional Environments.”  My thesis was that psychology professors entered the profession to heal themselves.

 

First, we had to empty the hoarder’s den.  It belonged to a 70-year-old professor who slowly sifted through his belongings, lovingly fingering piles of journals dated as early as 1959.  Empty Starbucks cups sat on cupboards, books were stacked waist-high on the floor.  Then his mother passed away, further delaying the cleaning process as he sat shiva.  The carpenters eventually built the interior walls, and the painters painted them. The work should have taken a week or two but it took months to schedule, then it was rescheduled due to emergencies elsewhere on campus. The mechanic fought with his supervisor to authorize the hours needed to set up the compressed air tubing for your experiments on mice to deliver various scents of vanilla, peppermint and chocolate.

 

You begged and pleaded with me but I could only lend a sympathetic ear.  I saw you sneak in on the weekends to install the tile floor - which was not allowed by union rules because it took away their work.

 

But you think you’re special because you couldn’t wait another day to start your work.  And then, on a Monday you lured me into your peppermint trap. The scents pulled me in like reminders of childhood, Christmas, and a quiet afternoon sitting in the Quad with my feet in the grass without emails or phone calls.  I didn’t realize until you locked the door behind me that I was your experiment, the mouse you’d been referring to all this time.

 

You’d never admit the truth - that you and I are the same.  As you’re monitoring my brain signals from the outside, you’re also trapped like me - with nowhere to turn to escape the labyrinth inside your head. We’re both lab mice running through a maze with no exit, never accomplishing the task that would merit its reward.

 

 

Author's Note

Full disclosure, AI helped me find the title “Irritability as a Predictor of Professional Sabotage in High-Stress Institutional Environments.”