RBOCareer (and also Captcha and Candy)

• Why is captcha so obsessed with finding motorcycles?
• I had a flyout with a school that would be best described as a “fixer-upper.”
• There are a lot of reasons not to take that position if offered.  But the one thing that really stuck out isn’t the department’s fault at all.
• There’s a part of the country that votes Blue but isn’t actually Blue at all.  I thought I had a good handle on all the different regions of the US but turns out I was wrong!
• I learned the term “PWI” on a tour of the campus.  (“What is PWI?” I asked, after the tour guide mentioned they were one. “Primarily White Institution,” she said, adding, “most of the black students choose to go to the HBC in our system.”)
• The Uber driver on the way back also said that integration never works because minorities always choose to self-segregate.  I said maybe, but how much of it is choice and are they getting the same quality of education?  If it is a choice and the education quality is the same, then it isn’t.  But that’s a big if.
• I went to a talk on segregation academies the other week.  They still exist and they’re still… PWI.
• Also got asked to interview for the deanlet position.
• One of my friends (in another department) basically told me not to do a long list of unprofessional things when at the interview.  I was both amused an insulted.
• My department head has, in the past, told me I should interrupt older white men less.  (I don’t interrupt junior faculty or minority faculty or women or basically anybody who doesn’t do repetitive multi-minute monologues.)  I told said head that I’d done a cost-benefit analysis.  Nobody has brought it up since I became middle aged.
• Someone from the dean’s office has started putting a large bucket of monster sized candy bars and bags of chips in the break room every Friday morning, courtesy of the dean.  Including payday which I really like.  I HATE this.  I end up spending my entire morning thinking about them and losing willpower and if I do indulge then I keep thinking about going back and getting more.  I should not be eating candy at ALL (insulin problems) and I’m also at the age where I don’t need empty calories.  Other people do obviously eat the junk food because its gone by the end of the day.  I need to work from home on Fridays, I guess, but I can’t entirely because I have office hours.
• Nobody else really likes Payday because when I went in around lunch (3 hours after I’d eaten my own lunch trying to avoid getting junk food), there were still three Paydays and a small bag of spicy chips left.
• I took a Payday. I may have to start refilling my water elsewhere on Fridays.
• When I went back 3 hours after that, the bowl was empty.   So if I wait long enough someone will eat everything I like.