The keys to the new office, I’m told, are ready to pick up, and although the new contract doesn’t officially start until next week and I am already neck deep in learning all the various systems of student, class and online content management – only an Australian university would have an administration system with the acronym BRUCE.

The experience of becoming of the manager that is the lot of the academic lecturer, is an unsettling one, competing with the attention needed to actually, well teach. I dream already of handing over these tasks to a steely-eyed admin assistant more willing and capable of dealing with the everyday toil that accompanies the grand act of calling out for everyone to listen to me for a bit and maybe you’ll learn a thing or two, otherwise known as the lecture ( yet another undead technology).

The penance then for daring to teach is the grind of administration, the oiling of the bureaucracy, but I’ve a long abandoned raid-geared level 80 human Mage cooling his heels in the seedy wizard’s pub,The Slaughtered Lamb, in Stormwind with dreams of retiring to the Westland, so I know all about the ‘grind’ and it’s rewards. academia is the nerdiest of all MMO’s.