It was almost poignant.

You could sense by the end of the meeting today that my dissertation committee genuinely felt bad for me and wanted me to find some successful conclusion to this debacle that has been my research program. While my side of the dissertation process has been plagued with the fortune of Job, I am at least pretty lucky in the committee I was able to put together: very nice guys who seem interested in my research and, more importantly, interested in getting me graduated. But even they couldn’t help laughing at me a little.

Okay, so it was mostly laughing with me, at first, as I recounted the setbacks upon setbacks and passed around the crusty, oblong bars of suck that were meant to be titanium crack growth specimens. The unintended generation of vertical cracks before the horizontal cracks really got going earned a chortle or two — one of those fun experimental research surprises! And when they asked when I was hoping to graduate — oh wait, no, see, now they’re laughing at me.

“Well, it was supposed to be last December.”
Ha!
“Then we thought May, until we saw how bad the specimens were.”
Hoo!
“And August looked doable, until this recent grip failure.”
Yeah, damn!
“Let me put it to you this way: I go on welfare as of September 1.”
Pffffbwahahaha! Oh there’s coffee everywhere!

Still somewhat optimistic and still earnestly wishing me the best, my committee and I agreed on a go-forward plan that will should produce an interesting and much-needed survey of some important unresolved issues in my particular niche of crack growin’, though without actually coming to any particular conclusion. Unfortunately it’s still going to require a helluva lotta maths. Boy I hate the maths; but then, the experimentin’ ain’t been real friendly to me lately, so I guess I’ll take what I can get.

They left with warm wishes and just a few more stifled snickers. “Well, have a fun summer,” they said with the all the seriousness of a “have a nice day” called out to a convict on his way to the gas chamber. “Good luck! Ha!”

I know deep down they really do care.

And because I just discovered this thing, I’m going to take this opportunity to play with SlideShare.



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