I appreciate the warning 👍

That would be a genuine long game, since it started in like 2013, with a Zillow listing.

I wondered about that, but I am not (structurally) missing confirmations or other stuff. Still possible, but it seems a bit asymmetrical at this stage.

I can't get in touch with her, although I imagine I could send a physical letter to her address detailing all of this. A very old-fashioned solution to a very modern problem. I'll dig up my fountain pen... 6/6

I also know which car she drives. Her dealership sent a confirmation of an appointment for that car's maintenance to my email. I know where she lives, since Amazon sent me an order confirmation of a set of items she ordered, including the delivery address. 5/

Takes a few minutes - nothing fancy, especially since I am not trying to impress some HR person. However, my profile was rejected because my email address is already in use. That is how I get all the messages - duh. 4/

To get started, I actually have quite a few US-based HR departments to choose from. However, ALL OF THEM list no contact details whatsoever and digitally enforce contacting them through systems that make me create personal profiles. I picked a random one and created a profile. 3/

Nothing radical, just contacting the employers who send the rejections, and telling them that (a) their rejections weren't actually reaching the person they thought they were sending them to and (b) they are informing me about someone else's applications, which is not good for various reasons. 2/

The obvious politics are not always that interesting (well, that depends on the reader, I suppose). The subtle rhetorical art embedded in all of them is a lot more interesting in terms of meaning-making. In that sense even the dictionary is political.

Interestingly, about eighteen months ago, I met Hans Ekkehard Plesser. Both he and I wrote such a glossary-style paper. We did not agree on the words. We had no trouble agreeing on the conceptual issues at stake, though.

Glossaries are matters of politics. There are so many versions of these out there now that a comparative political analysis is both possible and interesting (if only I had time). Led by the brilliant PhD student Ilse Dijkstra, we did such an analysis of handbooks in health promotion. Fascinating.

This was obviously not according to procedures and when they realised it was sent to someone in the ethics department (me), there were a lot of apologies from a lot of people. 2/2

We've had a pediatrician with my last name and the same initials in our university hospital. At some point the medical photographer sent a whole set of full body pictures of a patient to me instead of to him. 1/

Yes, the politics always matter. And those politics suck.

These things are not mutually exclusive and while I am in NL, I cannot look into the inner workings of every institute or every hire.

on subject areas (more pressure in the humanities, less in the medical and engineering fields - we are in medical humanities but embedded in a medical faculty, so: little language pressure here). 2/2

The requirement to be able to teach in Dutch is more strictly applied, that much is true. This does not have to translate into fewer foreign hires - learning Dutch, as a German for instance, is not that hard, and you get 2-3 years to learn it. Also, the language pressures are different depending 1/

We (NL) are still hiring Germans (out of our dept latest three hires, two are German) - the bigger problem is that we are not hiring as much as before in general.

At my own institute, they do this 5 years after you get to full prof, and again five years later - both by the same committee. After that, you are trusted to have shown that you can do the job. There are also annual evaluations with one's HoD - but those are very informal and uneventful. 2/2