Through some clever sleuth-work, your PLB team has identified, deduced, or simply guessed the ringtones currently employed by faculty members in the department.

1) Marlene Behrmann’s ringtone on David Plaut’s phone: When A Man Love’s A Woman, Michael Bolton.

* We here at the PLB celebrate Michael Bolton’s entire catalogue.

2) Ken Kotovsky’s ringtone for anyone: Christmas Song, The Chipmunks 

3) Lynne Reder’s ringtone on John Anderson’s phone: She Blinded Me With Science, Thomas Dolby

4) Anna Fisher’s ringtone on Ken Koedinger’s phone: From Russia With Love

5) David Rakison’s ringtone for himself: Baby Love, The Supremes

6) Tim Verstynen’s ringtone on Sheldon Cohen’s phone: Suit & Tie, Justin Timberlake

7) Any post-doc’s ringtone on any faculty member’s phone: Get a Job, The Silhouettes

8) Any faculty member on any post-doc’s phone: Chain Gang, Sam Cooke

9)  Erik Thiessen’s, David’ Rakison’s, and John Opfer’s ringtone for each other: The Three Amigos Salute.

10)  Any faculty member on Mike Scheier’s phone: Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye, Steam

A widespread panic erupted at this week’s faculty meeting upon hearing that there is a 6% probability that national funding agencies (NIH, NSF, & DARPA) will be cutting their funds by $10 million in 2018 as part of sequester negotiations.

“It was absolute chaos,” said Anna Fisher, “I’d never seen such a thing before. We immediately started preparing for the worst without reading the full announcement.”

“In making our decision about how seriously to consider this event we used an alpha of 0.05,” reported Brian MacWhinney as he boarded up the windows to his office in anticipation of impending armageddon, “So a 6% chance falls outside our confidence bounds, meaning we must consider this a plausible event.”

“Look, I realize that this is a low likelihood of happening,” says Mike Scheier, “But given that it could dramatically affect the department if it does occur I think it warrants a serious discussion.” Scheier then proceeded to walk into his office, light a cigar and begin working on his memoires in anticipation not being Department Head when the financial doomsday may-or-may-not occur.

Others doubted the wisdom of taking such an unprobable event seriously.

“They’ve got it all backwards. They’re rejecting the wrong null hypothesis!” says Mike Tarr, “We should get worried when the chance of it not happening is less than 5%, not when there’s still a 94% chance it wont!”

“Seriously,” said David Creswell, “can’t we all just chill and meditate on this for a while?”

After the panic subsided at the meeting, several faculty members were reported to have run to their offices and signed up with Monster.com and asked colleagues for feedback on their revising resumes.

Last week’s faculty meeting was dominated by the looming fiscal crises that the department faces due to “shifts in funding priorities” by NIH & DARPA. Department Head, Dr. Michael Scheier, proposed a novel funding opportunity that he was made aware of 15 minutes before the meeting.

“I was going through my Inbox this morning,” said Scheier, “and I came across something that I think looks really promising. I got an email from a guy, he says he’s a prince in Nigeria. Now I don’t know what that means, because I didn’t think that Nigeria had a monarchy, but listen to what he has to say.”

Scheier then proceeded to read a rather long email, riddled with grammatical errors, from an individual claiming to be a “prince in exile” who had $1.56 billion in holdings that were locked out after the coup that overthrew his family. According to the author, Honorable and Nobel Prince William Shatner III, the only way to get out of the country with his money is to transfer the funds into an American bank account first. If the department was willing to just send Prince Shatner the account and routing numbers for the department, then the author stated he would be willing to give the department a 10% cut.

“If you do the math, that’s $156 million dollars!” exclaimed Scheier, “Now I don’t know you you’d all feel about this, okay, but I think it’s really something we should consider. Especially given our recent shortfall on graduate student stipends”

Overall, the faculty opinion appeared mixed on the idea.

“You know I think this is fascinating,” said Dr. Brian McWhinney, “Really interesting offer. But I’d like to say, that my experience working on the Niger-Congo languages, I’d want to clarify what he meant by ‘dire circumstances’. That could mean a lot of different things if translated incorrectly.”

“What’d I’d want to know is whether that’s in US dollars or Nigerian naira,” said Dr. Ken Kotovsky, “I mean that conversion rate is a real pain in the ass.”

Others were not quite a supportive.

“Are you f$%#ing kidding me!” said Dr. David Klahr. “I don’t know why we’re even having this conversation? Our funds are locked in through the university. We’d have to get their approval and you know how long that’d take. He’d have found someone else before we even know what our account number is. Seems like a waste of time to me.”

Throughout the conversation, Dr. David Rakison kept interjecting “Zzzzzzzzzz” from his perch in the corner of the room.

Despite having six other agenda items, the entire faculty meeting was dominated by debate on the details and merits of the offer. No consensus was reached, however, beyond an agreement to “get more details” before the next faculty meeting.