Enigmas at Work

1. Why are benefits not handled by the benifits office? What do they do in the benefits office if not benefits?


2. What happened to my 401k?


3. Why are my students begging for make-up exams despite the fact that the syllabus says that there are no make-ups and that missed exams are replaced by the final (and I have told them this repeatedly)?


4. What am I going to talk about at the seminar on Wednesday afternoon? (Someone else wrote my abstract based on a summary of my idea communicated in a short conversation over the copy machine!)


5. Why is my office 77 degrees with the heat off and the air conditioning on?


6. Do I really need to teach the probability chapter?


7. Where do I get more of the bullet-tip dry erase markers?


8. Why is the wireless internet on my laptop faster and more reliable than the wired internet on my desktop?


9. What can we say about the primitive ideals in a finitely generated algebra over a principal ideal domain?