I Have the Yellow Highlighter Stains to Prove It

Today I spent a few of hours doing lit review for my hunter research proposal. Lit review is basically a process that never ends. Seemingly no matter what the topic, you can always find more papers that you should read. And each of those papers generates more papers in a sort of exponential growth sequence that so far for me on this project looks like 3^n. (Robert describes it as looking like a multi-level marketing scheme.) I have almost reached the point where I am not even looking at the bibliography section of the papers, but just hoping to get through and summarize the ones I have already printed out. These days when I see a reference that I cannot easily get from an electronic database through UT (generally because the particular issue of the journal is too old, though occasionally because UT doesn’t carry the journal), I am actually rather relieved – Oh good, I don’t have to track down this 1992 article in the Journal of the American Board of Family Practitioners on using a segmented database as the sample frame for a focus group.

The best quote of the day comes from a paper describing a series of focus groups with heterosexual men about their relationships with women and sex:

A comical moment occurred in the focus group when a man who had been rather abrasive throughout the session bragged, “I always use a condom” as he pulled one from his pocket. Almost instantly, nearly every other man in the group jumped up and pulled out a condom from their pocket—a scene reminiscent of an older Western in which all cowboys simultaneously pulled out their guns.

Other exciting activities included:

Writing an agenda for and then holding a conference call meeting on the Houston fishing project some of you know to be my current particular hell. Before the meeting, my right hand woman K said, “I think I need a Coke before this meeting.” I said, “I think I need a rum and Coke.” But because the trouble-making individuals didn’t bother to show up for the meeting, and two members of the triumvirate sharing ultimate management responsibility for the project (a division of power that has the usual results) were there and willing to bless my recommendations, we made about 2 steps forward with no steps back. I even managed to get the consultant for the non-profit organization funding our grant to agree to my boss’s cunning plan (that seriously continues to make me laugh in appreciation of the way a hidden evil genius really came through in this idea) for the consultant to take responsibility for devising the survey and methodology for my most problematic, uncooperative, yet demanding internal client D. As I told my boss when she thought this idea up out of nowhere in a previous (more private) meeting, “My god! That is absolutely brilliant on so many levels. Those two totally deserve each other!”

Sitting in on what turned into a 45 minute meeting with my boss and my right hand woman K that ultimately came down to the fact that K had mistakenly agreed to do something for someone in another division because K and my boss had an email chain earlier in the week in which they used the word “appropriate” to mean very different things. Oh the trouble people get into when I am home sick and asleep on a random Tuesday afternoon. Imagine how bad off we’d be if we didn’t work in the Communications Division.