I seem to spend 98% of my time opening business bank accounts, drafting vehicle policies, getting our dirt bikes fixed, staffing an office, and figuring out how to get stranded enumerators over collapsed bridges back home. Surely this is nor my comparative advantage. All those readers planning to become field economists: beware the admin overload. Consider formal theory as a profession.
Note to self: amend vehicle policy to include “No animal carcasses to be transported in the vehicle, no matter how much profit they will fetch in the Monrovia market.”
My Liberian English is improving. High end Toyota Land Cruisers (like the one lent to us by UNHCR, which will no longer transport our enumerators’ smoked baboon carcasses) are known as “Golden Summers” round these parts. As in “You take the hard top, I’ll take the Golden Summer”. For a while I found this puzzling. After some sleuthing, it turns out that the first upscale cruiser arrived in the country for the UN’s special representative, Mr. Trevor Gordon-Somers. That was 15 years ago. I would love to be a linguist in this country.
3 Responses
Your note reminds me of an email my former colleagues and I got two years ago: “microwave is only for heating of food, no other things.”
I never asked why that email had to be sent in the first place, and I don’t reget that.
Don’t you have graduate students to handle all that stuff? Give us a little hope here, Professor!
Good luck enforcing the no food policy! Never going to happen.