"I'm not really worried about the Chinese government having my stuff. What are they going to do with it? They have no jurisdiction over me. I'm much more worried about the US government tracking me."
"Ugh, you think the government is trying to track everything on you? Conspiracy theorist much?"
Lean into the idea. The Chinese are tracking us? Awesome, since you're listening - Chinese spies please come and build high speed rail over here 谢谢
(Non-racist) Guy who walks up to random Chinese people and asks them to build highspeed rail for him.
My boss did that in a meeting a few months ago. Just leaned into the microphone on his computer and said "China, can you send me the transscript for this meeting?"
I’m imaging a person rapidly animorphing back and forth between a gammon boomer doing that trademark alcoholic smirk and based zoomer communist doing a Fortnite dance.
Horse shoe theory for political humor.
Honestly I wanted to ask him why i was even in the meeting if China is going to give us the transscript anyway. My one job is to be the guy who takes notes from all the Wisdom(tm) that the old ass professors blabbers out.
Does your boss think your name is china? If a boomer they could be senile enough at this point.
For real though, the lack of awareness that leads a person to make a cheap and unoriginal joke that directly assaults the role and value of a person in the room with them.
If you don’t mind me asking: what’s the actual like job that allows a person to be the note taker at a university? It sounds cool, like imagine being the person paid to follow Chomsky around and write down what he says lol. Obviously your asshole boss is the equal and opposite downside to the potential upside of a based professor and I don’t mean to belittle that or the having to deal with it by imagining a cool version.
I'm not really a note-taker, as much as just doing secretary work. Part of my job is to assist the myriad of commitees we have here, and that includes going to some meetings that you have nothing to do with, and taking minutes / notes which are then sent to the professors in question. This particular meeting was between a high ranking professor and the guy in charge of the entire university, so I think it was an attempt at breaking the ice, since the atmosphere seemed tense at first.
That’s pretty cool tbh. Getting a direct view into the inner workings of academia as an institution.
In that very same meeting they also discussed a lot (off the record) about "wokeness" coming to our country and whether we would get "American conditions" with references to a report from a few months prior titled "Report from a woke university" which was written like it was Iraq circa 2004. All in all it made me pretty sad for the future, since any amount of time dedicated to "combatting the rising wokeness" is time that isn't spent on making sure that our universities actually fucking function. All our students are depressed as hell and rents have reached a point in the city that people are being priced out of attending.