Holy crap!

I'm sitting in my office, deep into a book on Wharton as a spatial theorist (this is, by the way, my last week on Wharton for a while; I submitted my unfinished chapter to my advisor yesterday and am planning to begin a new one. I'm just trying to get through a stack of ILL books I ordered.), when my cell phone rings. It is C from his office. The conversation went something like this:

M: Hey, what's up? Are you on your way home?

C: I have an on-campus interview.

M: What in the hell are you talking about? (Thinking to myself: how is this possible? Your field's version of MLA isn't for 2 more weeks.)

C: I have an on-campus interview.

M: That's great! Could you give me some more details?

C: I have an on-campus interview.

Ok, so I am exaggerating a bit, but C was in a bit of shock. It seems that he checked his voice mail when he finished teaching, as he does obsessively these days, and he had a call from Medium West Coast State University requesting an on-campus. It seems that MWC State is following C's fields recent trend of foregoing preliminary interviews at their version of MLA in favor of bringing candidates on campus. They actually want him to come the week of the conference, which he obviously can't do as he now has 8 preliminary interviews there (did I forget to mention that?). My normally unshakable husband is more than a little shaken.

As for me, I am so proud of him! I want to run fly up to the Big Norteast State School where he got his Ph.D. and tell all those hoity-toity, up-tight people who made his academic life hell for almost 7 years: "Look, this is the guy you said couldn't do it! Not only did he do it, but he did it 2 years faster than most of your students, while teaching a 4-4 course load, and having a wife and a child. Oh, and by the way, he's got 8 interviews (1 at an R1 university) at your big conference and 1 on-campus already! What do you think of him now?"