Past workplaces.

The girlfriend of the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living) client with (disabilities) is involved with some sort of departmental climate review at a higher ed school where she's a grad and has a regular event staffing position, and a few weeks ago when we were all catching up over coffee I asked her how that was going, since she had just gotten back from a trip there for that.

And, she started telling me about the report that she was writing and she began outlining problems about a professor with bad boundaries and two grads who went on to teach there but a dean kept them in check, and now that that dean is gone their behavior has devolved, and besides the institution has a habit of hiring grads and has a culture that's very hard to break, etc. etc. etc., and we talked about this kind of stuff for like fifteen or twenty minutes while the one (lesbian) sister of my one (former) (assisted living) client with (disabilities) was sitting there quietly, just listening, so then towards the end of the conversation, I took a verbal step back and was like, "Higher ed workplaces are not like normal workplaces, in what other workplace do you have to spend so much godawful time trying to figure out convoluted personal dynamics and work around people who don't do their jobs and who don't necessarily seem to want to," and I then added that it's just this unnecessary massive timesuck and that that whole kind of thing is just a bad fit for me because I have too much common sense and I just want to show up to my job and do the work.

It really was like this massive blast from the past.

I mean, there's some personality dynamics at the one (Irish-y) burger joint on the first floor of a historic hotel where I work now, but I could spend maybe 5 minutes discussing them, tops?

Higher ed is just exponentially different, and worse.

And they always invest so much time writing up these reports that no-one reads or does much about, and oftentimes it's just an underlying personnel or staffing problem.

It's like my one lawyer friend from (Missouri) observed years ago from her having quite a few people she knows involved in higher ed, that sector seems to involve a lot of "busy work" (i.e., work that doesn't seem to do or produce anything.)

Amen.

Well said, sister.