It seems I spoke too soon; the financial powers that be apparently are unconvinced that keeping around a visitor to do something (teach sections of undergraduate methods) that perhaps a dozen or more of the department’s tenured or tenure-track faculty members are nominally qualified to do needs a bit more justification, particularly in the midst of a “budget crunch,” at least by “university that has more money than the Queen of England” standards. Nothing definite, but playing the odds in the presence of asymmetrical payoffs for misprediction seems like a bad idea at this point—potentially wasting hours of my life on applications beats potentially having to beg for a job at Best Buy or Red Hat, any day.

On the upside, a whole new vista of postdocs and one-years have been opened to me. Happy happy, joy joy.

Incidentally, I’m reminded of one of my favorite NewsRadio quotes: “You can’t take something off the Internet. It’s like taking pee out of a swimming pool.”