A week in the world of the academic administrator

This week is going to be crazy. I tell you, I don't remember the last time my schedule was this tight. It's like all administrative duties has been crammed into the next week with back to back meeting from tomorrow morning til Friday afternoon. Tomorrow hell breaks loose with the monthly department head group meeting followed by the first two annual assessment meetings with people in the department. Wednesday I'm going to the local travel clinic with the rest of the field crew for this summer to get immunised against all sorts of diseases before travelling to faraway field site. Hopefully I will make it back from that appointment just in time for the lunch seminar I suddenly find myself in charge of and another couple of annual assessment meetings. Thursday will be the big "get research group together and discuss our results from last years fieldwork"-meeting. This will probably be the day where we realize that we have nothing to report and that our work sucks (or that we are fabulous super scientists who will change the world). Friday I am going to attend the women's rights group at my workplace for their monthly meeting for the first time. While I'm all for women's rights I have a strong suspicion that I don't resonate with the work of this particular group very much, but time will show. They give a kind of career workshop/ talk about once a month and while I do like the idea of having that kind of resources available, I don't like the way they are singling out women for access to these events. Especially because we don't have any such resources available for male employees.