10 Easy Ways to Irritate a Professor

Clearly, it has been a difficult week and, with that in mind, I offer '10 Easy Ways to Irritate a Professor'. I, of course, rise above such things. I am serene, unruffled and glow with the tranquil spirit of one wholly at ease.

Require that a Word form is completed in which the boxes and dotted lines where information should be entered are improperly set up and extend, stray across pages, and render content in the wrong fonts. 

Send a complex grant proposal to be checked and approved without warning less than 24 hours before the deadline. 

Allow your students to send to all and sundry a large and ill thought out survey that they say will take 10 minutes to complete but actually takes 45 minutes. 

Require irrelevant signatures and approvals, prior to a decision being taken, as a method of reducing your workload. 

Insist that, in addition to an email, a document be physically mailed 'for the record'. 

Send a request for information with a short, and entirely arbitrary, deadline that happens to suit your work schedule. 

Set a deadline that falls at close of business on a Friday for information that will only be looked at on Monday, thereby depriving the Professor of the opportunity to deal with it on the weekend. 

Require that the Professor registers, by way of a complex process, on your intranet in order to obtain a small number of meeting papers. 

Change the subject in an email without changing the subject line, or worse, change the 'from' name in your email so simple searching will not find all of your emails, or worst, send a follow-up email from your hotmail account inevitably destined for the spam filter. 

Call an important meeting for two days hence and express surprise and annoyance that it is ill-attended.