“Punching beavers in the face”

Anyone else get a sense of American paranoia from Steven Colbert’s comment above? It was part of his show that outlined the Hockey Night in Canada music theme being passed around like cocaine at an eighties party in Washington. Watch the clip and decide for yourself who is truly being mocked although Ed Stelmach, Alberta’s premier doesn’t come off as the brilliant politician that we all know he is.

So it starts

I realized that the process of disconnecting from my current POW would happen in fits and starts but it was brought home by a colleague last week. While trying to resolve a matter that I have been working on for over a year now, he asked, “Why do you still care?”. For a few reasons, I don’t want to leave a mess for the next person, I care what happens for my faculty and students, and because I hate loose ends. Perhaps it is this final point that is the most important, at least to me.

Before I left on holidays last summer I created documentation for my new supervisor so that she wouldn’t have to walk into a new workplace without any understanding of what had happened previously. Knowing that I wouldn’t be there when she arrived it was important to me that this process be as smooth as possible. Why is it when people leave positions or workplaces we do such a shoddy job of helping the transition for ourselves and the groups that we work with?

Perhaps my colleague was telling me in his own way that I need to start letting go of certain things. I do understand that this is occurring and will continue to happen. As a matter of fact I am skipping out on a few trainings in the next few weeks to focus on wrapping things up. I don’t want to leave feeling like I haven’t done everything that I can to help with the transition and right now it is feeling like a very lonely process.