Lecturers

xx mm

Surely it's not appropriate for a lecturer to end an e-mail with that?!

Philological Society

I regret to inform you that your submission has not won the Prize on this occasion, but the reviewer(s) have recommended publication in Transactions of the Philological Society, but also suggest some revisions to your manuscript. Therefore, I invite you to respond to the reviewer(s)' comments and revise your manuscript.

Some of the reviewers' comments were actually quite reasonable, even. So I'm going to have to revise the taboo language paper, as well as transform the Shetland marriages paper into the style of the journal Local Population Studies (endnotes! grr!) within a reasonable amount of time. I think they mean two to three weeks. In addition, I will shortly receive 25 first-year essays about social and geographic variation in English, ready to mark.

Philosophical musing

Is it possible to think you’re a hypochondriac without being one?

University e-mail

In recent days the performance problems described below (please read that too), have got worse and this sometimes results in login failures and people being logged off. We know this is happening but we are not able to do much about it. The problem relates to the sheer number of students trying to access mail during busy periods and it is overloading the server infrastructure. The only way to solve this will be to upgrade the server and that is already planned but unlikely to take place before the end of the semester (the details are outlined below in the linked document).

The performance problems really only affect the system between 11am and 6pm on weekdays. At other times the server doesn't suffer from load issues. If you can avoid these peak times then you will get better access. You may also get better response by using a different method of accessing your mail e.g. using Thunderbird or pine rather than webmail.

Read this again.

Please do work at this university. We realise you need to use e-mail to actually do some of this work, but please do not check your e-mail during working hours.

Why don't they just fix the system?