1. Administrative incompetence is rewarded. Colleagues who are administratively incompetent are rarely given administrative tasks in case they make a mess of them. The administratively competent are punished by being given more work.
2. Rejection letters from journal editors are rarely pretty, but it is possible to draw comfort from the fact that referee #3 cries him/herself to sleep at nights.
3. If you get a research grant, colleagues will ask: 1. How much is the grant worth? 2. Do you get any teaching relief (i.e., am I lumbered with your teaching), and 3. What is the research on? In that order.
4. Emails that begin ‘Hi’, ‘Hey’ or without any salutation whatsoever immediately go to the bottom of the ‘to answer’ list.
5. Every discipline has at least one serial bore who turns up to every conference/seminar/workshop, sits on the front row, dominates the questions, and is an ‘expert’ on whatever the topic might be. The serial bore last published something interesting/original in 1987, but that is no bar to their boundless ‘expertise’.
6. Colleagues with impossibly tidy offices are rarely normal.
7. It is very tempting to respond to Nigerian 419 scam emails.
8. It is impossible not to wonder what colleagues who look like they find their clothes in a dumpster, don’t have a car or kids, or any apparent interests, spend their salary on.
rogermacginty 
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