Or should that be g-RANT?
Today, at 4:15, I finally submitted the Grant With No Deadline.
Or, more accurately, the grant that had no deadline…
no deadline…
no deadline…
no deadline…
for months, and then suddenly HAD to be submitted WITHIN A WEEK or else the world would END!!!
Regular readers will know that I go a little… eccentric when grant time comes around, and this time was no exception*. I also got rather paranoid when I realised that the process of assembling all the component parts of the grant (various forms and letters with original signatures, scanned documents, Word files, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint figures, published manuscripts, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, ethics certificates, the Magna Carta, CVs, and the PIs’ world cup picks) into the final version** was going to spill over from Saturday’s epic day in the office into Monday, and felt the need to protect my work so far:
and here’s my colour-coded list of all the individual components that had to be assembled. Note the staple; this baby ran to three pages.
Well, it’s done now, and I can finally relax dive into the hugely backlogged pile of other work that I’ve been ignoring “until after the grant’s done”.
Although I do like to whine when I have weeks like this last one, the coolness of the science in the grants I work on does help to mitigate the stress and the craziness. When I took this job I knew there would be times like this – but I had times like that in my old job, too, and I prefer it now that I get stressed over interesting and important things that I actually care about.
As I like to remind myself, my job (and maybe any job in academia) aint perfect on the micro level, but the macro level is pretty sweet.
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*Twitter is perfect for this kind of silliness.
**a CD and two hard copies. Seriously.
