False Mantra

I barely pay attention anymore. There are now only two venues through which I may take in information: either if a Mama Bird (Professor) chews and regurgitates food (Powerpoint slides) into my eager infantile mouth, or someone says something a fuckton of times and eventually one odd packet of information makes it through the mental firewall I put up when I enter a classroom. One of the things that eventually made it through my blockade was that one of the cardinal sins of entering the profession of pharmacy was not becoming involved.

Now, "becoming involved" has a broad range of definitions. The low end of the spectrum is plopping down annual membership fees and then subsequently plopping down a dirty dozen of bizarre 4-letter acronyms on your resume. The high end of the spectrum is where some of found ourselves earlier this month -- at a Board of Pharmacy meeting providing testimony about (absolutely braindead) proposed regulations that could drastically affect our profession. Ergo it would make sense that if some of us wanted to further become involved in the debate over this steamy pile of a proposed regulation that the COP would endorse such an action.

After organizing a paid charter bus to ferry concerned pharmtards 170 miles down the Parkway to the meeting and carefully orchestrating the moving parts of the plan, the affected faculty members and course coordinators were notified. Most had no issue, and in fact supported the plan. The only dissenting person lecturing that day sent back a very professional response explaining the difficulties of rescheduling a certain activity. That's fair, and I have no beef with that. However, a department head sent this e-mail back to the plan's architect:



I would first like to point out that iPhones do, in fact, possess the novel feature of "punctuation."

But beyond the low-hanging fruit: what's wrong with this picture? Since when is e-mail not the venue to use for anything in our COP? I'm sorry: is that reserved expressly for Campus Police to tell me "They rapin' errrbody out here"?



If Dr. Old Andy Richter can use e-mail to personally disparage my professionalism, someone damn well can use it to plan getting students involved in Board of Pharmacy meetings. This cause is not the time to put a foot on the throat of students trying to do exactly what the COP preaches -- to get involved. This is the equivalent of Lab personnel telling me that it's okay to pee in my sterile product -- it goes against what we've heard for going on three years now. If the COP faculty want us to get involved, they have to make way. If I were in class I'd be zoning out anyway.

Awesome: