As I was saying, The Dark Side is manipulating my weak[ened] soul. I have a certain job at a certain academic journal. The irony of this is not often lost on me, given the almost farcical reliance of my entire future upon the decisions made by persons just like myself at certain other journals. But I digress.
In my job, I get unsolicited emails from persons not unlike myself offering to write pieces for the journal. (Let's call it Journal Y). Since anything unsolicited is subject to your usual sadistic blind peer-review process, I generally accept these offers unless they are utterly insane. Which is actually more often than you might suppose, but I digress again.
Some time ago, I accepted one of these offers from a guy, call him Thorn. As in, in my side. Thorn wrote his piece and then proceeded to install himself at number one with a bullet on my all-time shitlist. Thorn has writen me umpty-ump emails about this one measly piece for Journal Y. He requires that I acknowledge his emails within a single working day, or I will receive a second email letting me know that I have not yet acknowledged his first email. Since the day his piece was received, he has emailed me on average once every ten days to check on its progress. We should note that the standard appearance rate in a hot-shit journal is about 2 years. Journal Y is not a hot-shit journal, but the point is, Thorn is crazy. And he's making me want to kill him very creatively. But wait, I haven't got to the supervillain part yet.
Finally the damn thing is accepted, signed bloody sealed and delivered. My plan was to shoehorn it into the very next available issue, no matter what the Higher Ups had to say, and then skulk off home to dab iodine gingerly on my chronic thorn-wounds.
But, I'm sure you see it coming, the kind of tipping-point event designed to convert frumpy secretaries into vessels of evil is upon us. Today, I received another email from Thorn informing me that (1) he'd like an update on the progress of his piece, (2) he'd like to write another piece for Journal Y on subject Z.
Xtin dons supervillain catsuit
BwaHAHAHAHAha! You are never writing a piece for this journal again, my poor deluded little friend! You have choked yourself on your own carcinogenic annoyingness! You may now kiss my shiny black latex ass before I cram my six-inch stiletto boot-heel down your scrawny sanctimonious throat!
fade to black
Oh, this is terrible. And I will never know if I hate him because he's an idiot, or because my piece for Journal Q is overdue.
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