I suspect I’ve mentioned before that I’m difficult to supervise…

The problem isn’t really a conventional one – I’m not the sort of staff member or student who digs themselves into enormous holes or creates catastrophic problems for other people. My problem, mainly, is that I feel sort of globally responsible for whatever situation I happen to land in – and it simply doesn’t occur to me to bring a supervisor in or ask anyone else for help, unless I have first completely exhausted whatever I can personally do. Unfortunately, since I’m generally not bad at managing most things on my own, when I do bring supervisors in, what they get to hear is not simply whatever my problem is – but this whole elaborate discussion of how the situation has unfolded over a period of several months, what I’ve done to try to resolve it, my analysis of why these attempts haven’t succeeded, etc. The general reaction this gets is utter dismay that I haven’t asked someone for help much earlier in the process.

Yesterday, one of my long-suffering supervisors got an immense data dump from me on a sprawling and poorly interconnected constellation of what, objectively, are low-level irritations – nothing important in the grand scheme of things, but still having an impact on how I work. Much of this relates to my current appointment, whose process my supervisor captured quite well by saying, “We fought very hard to get you – against others who didn’t want us to have you and, for that matter, even against yourself!” That’d be true enough – not in the sense that I didn’t want this position – I very much did – but in the sense that it always made some sense to me that better candidates might be out there and, ultimately, I didn’t want a position that others might better fill. So I recurrently found myself in positions where I was expressing understanding and at least some genuine sympathy with desires not to hire me – and I had never particularly considered how perverse this practice might have looked to those trying to get me hired…

Regardless, I have a particular position now – and have therefore needed to bow out of other roles I filled before. And this kind of transition is never without its teething pains. One of those pains appears to be that I have “outed” myself as an intellectual – and brought out something like the inner jock in at least a small number of colleagues. Nothing serious flows on from this. It just means that whatever I send to the common printer tends to get scrutinised – when I walk out to retrieve it, it’s not unlikely that someone else will have it, and will be commenting ostentatiously on how complicated it looks. If I don’t pick up my printing immediately, it’s not unusual for someone to bring it to me – again for the opportunity to rib about the obscurity of what I read. (I keep having to sit on myself to avoid pointing out that I am assigning this stuff to students – sometimes students only in their second year of undergraduate study – so there’s only so complex the material can be…) There are other low-level issues, mainly involving interruptions and some physical obstructions, particularly if I’m in a hurry and urgently need (as often happens in my overpacked schedule) to get in and out of my office quickly. And then there are some potentially more serious things – which were originally the sole issues I had intended to discuss (because, of course, I try not to bring up trivial things with my supervisors…), but which connected to all of the small things in such a way that, ultimately, everything eventually dribbled out…

The discussion was quite productive, with a number of useful concrete decisions falling out of the exchange – and the upshot is that I’m wondering (again) why I don’t bring things like this up much earlier – why I perceive people like supervisors to be figures of last resort, to whom I should bring problems only once the latter become completely insoluable for me… My supervisors are enormously tolerant with my tendency to do this – they’ll live with not seeing me at all for months, while I putter along in my own way. But it’s clear that they don’t regard me as wasting their time with trivialities – and that I generally find their feedback useful and productive. But it’s not even a matter of, say, considering talking to them about something, and then actively deciding to hold off to see how the situation evolves – it literally doesn’t occur to me to approach them – the thought never even enters my mind – unless I hit one of these situations where I don’t believe I have the authority, or the right, or the skill to make a decision without consulting them. I suppose there’s probably an “if it ain’t broke” dimension to all of this – it may even be that involving supervisors at some earlier point would actually result in less productive interactions. I just always wonder, when walking out of this kind of conversation, why I don’t seek them out more often.