HACkers blog

As a counterpoint to what I will miss about UCT when I go, some of the feedback on what others say they will miss about me:

• organising coffee / hot chocolate for meetings
• recognising individual strengths and potential on a team, and fostering that
•  treating them with respect and dignity
• fighting for "all of us"
• being nice (yes, can you believe)
• having a history in one's head
• paying for his holidays (OK, that was Wayne. Why Bremner didn't just make out my salary cheque direct to him to save the bank charges I don't know. I could have gotten more coffee that way.)

 And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

What I will miss about UCT:

• Some truly amazing students. Some that I've had the pleasure to teach, some I've worked with on committees, some who've worked in our labs and others I've just known around the place. Some linger on as Facebook friends, others as die-hard Facebook pokers and some reappear in the most unexpected places.
  

 What I will not miss about UCT:

•  Large echoey passages that amplify noise from outside lecture theatres or computer labs - or from those horrible hand-dryers - to damaging volumes, no matter how you try to block it out. Especially when the noobs arrive. And most especially when they're Commerce students during orientation. 

With the last few days slipping into one long tea party, cracks in the universe are starting to appear and some of the deeply hidden weirdness is starting to ooze through.

Like people I've never seen before stopping me to confirm that it's true I'm really, really leaving on Thursday, and telling me how much I've meant to them and how much they'll miss me. And people I've known since pa fell off the bus looking at me oddly when they discover that I'm still here and didn't leave five years ago. 

So, what will I miss about UCT:

• Some really great people I've had the privilege of working alongside. I've been blessed with an awesome team, with a succession of wonderful line managers (direct line managers, that is) in the main, and some truly inspiring colleagues and comrades more broadly who've shaped this experience in ways they'll never fully realise, and would modestly deny anyway.
  

 What I will not miss about UCT:

•  The celebration, systematisation and promotion of mediocrity in a supposed institution of excellence. The thrall which surrounds people beaten with the stupid stick, and the high regard in which the vacuous, opportunistic and downright dumb are held. If someone lacks social skills, writes impenetrably and can't steer a train of thought down a straight track it isn't necessarily a sign of genius: sometimes it's the converse, despite whatever letters someone may have after their name or whatever rank or position they hold.
  

...the more they return to what they once were.

Who said it was only the Balinese that experienced time as cyclic?

Yes, that really is Glen back with Winnie, just like in the old days... 

And so, we were informed on the departure of Prof. Bremner Building*, we'd reached the end of an ,

and things at were set to change quite dramatically.

Quite tellingly, then, the discovery on the website of  its more blatantly commercial namesake, that we should encounter this:  

An explanation of why he chose to retain the Transformation portfolio himself, perhaps?  

 (More)