Oh, that sounds frustrating, worst. I hope they get you an office.
fluff, argh! I also get stuff like that from DH. He SAH, but last week he had deadlines to meet and when I was making small talk about getting dinner on the way home the next day, he said that he was counting on me coming home early afternoon so he could work. Um, no? You can't just randomly count on me to not be at work any time you please; I had things to do, and a new student arriving that I needed to orient. In general, I assume I have a full working day unless its arranged far in advance that he needs childcare. But he seems to see my job as endlessly flexible and on short notice, too. It made me feel like back when DD was a baby and even though I did in fact work from home most of the time and look after her, he was constantly wanting me to leave home later or come home earlier on the days I did go in.
I'm feeling pretty down - a grant I had real hopes for was rejected, and a PhD candidate just turned down an offer, which I had done a lot of string pulling to arrange funding for. And unfortunately that's it on the PhD funding front until next year - the way we do it is each person picks their best applicant to back and then the applicants compete. So that funding I cobbled together from multiple sources will now go back into its respecitve pots for the supervisors of the next best candidates to squabble over.
I'm feeling more and more like mat leave has just killed my career - I can't seem to recover. I'm pretty sure this candidate turned down the place in favour of another position with an actual 'research group', and I can definitely see even if you really like the project chosing another project where you'd have peers and postdocs and such working with you, compared to being the sole person other than the supervisor. So I'm not getting grants because I haven't done work 'recently'; I'm not getting PhD students because I have no one in my group; and I'm not doing anything because I've got no grants and no PhD students.
Two undergrads working for me over the summer, though - but that is being problemmatic, as an international exchange student who was supposed to arrive a month ago only just showed up, and I'm going on a family holiday tomorrow. I'm going to have to be doing a lot of work to remote supervise her while I'm away, which I find frustrating as I'd really just like a break.
And, also got some perspective - could be worse! I had simply assumed that my friend who returned after mat leave on a 50% contract would have had some reduction in workload, compared to pre-leave. Apparently not - just like me, she not only had no reduction in teaching but had a major increase in admin upon her return. At least I'm working FT, and am doing some research. She works her 50% time and a bit more to squeak out her teaching and increased admin, and then getting lambasted for not moving forward on research. Um, because she's now doing in 50% of time tasks that would generally take 60-70% of a FT person? I'm really incensed on her behalf. Although this appears to be standard operating procedure for our Uni. I'm not sure how our respective depts got our Athena SWAN awards...