The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered by university physicists. The element, tentatively named Administratium, has no protons or electrons, so that its atomic number is 0. However, it does have 1 neutron, 87 assistant neutrons, 75 vice neutrons, 38 associate vice neutrons, and 111 assistant vice neutrons. This gives it an atomic number of 312. These 312 particles are held together by a force that involves meson-like particles called morons.
    Because it has no protons or electrons, administratium is inert. Nonetheless, it can be detected chemically, because it impedes every reaction at which it is present. According to one of the discoverers, even a small amount of administratium made one reaction that normally lasts less than one second take more than four days.
    Administratium has a half-life of approximately three years. It does not actually decay; instead, it undergoes a reorganization in which vice neutrons, assistant vice neutrons, and certain assistants to the neutron exchange places. Some studies have indicated that its mass actually increases after each reorganization, although this has yet to be explained. Another phenomenon which has been observed (as expected from the mechanics of minute particles) is that the more one tries to pin down the positions of the vice neutrons within the structure of administratium, the more uncertain those positions become.
    Administratium is known to be toxic and may be a serious hazard in the workplace. It is commonly found in an institution's newest, best-appointed, and best-maintained buildings. Toxicologists report that there is no case known in which administratium was cleansed from such a setting once it accumulated there.

A woman told one of her friends about all her medical ailments and how she had found no relief for them, despite her visits to a variety of specialists. The friend had a computer program designed to diagnose medical conditions, so they decided to put her symptoms into the program. The friend booted up the program and asked for the first symptom.

"I have this nervous twitch in my eyelids and in my hands". The friend selected the appropriate item from a menu and asked for the next condition.

"I never can get any sleep". The friend went to the program's menu again.

"I have these jags where I start talking and just never seem to stop, even when nobody wants listen to me anymore, and I just keep . . ." The friend nodded and picked another item from the menu.

"I've never been able to maintain a relationship for more than three or four years." Nod, search, click.

"I'm almost 40 and I still haven't had children . . .". The friend nodded again and went to the appropriate menu. "Any more symptoms?", the friend asked.
"No, I think that's it."

The friend clicked on "diagnosis" and the hard drive whirred. After a few seconds, the screen was redrawn and the diagnosis appeared. It said . . .
         Assistant Professorship

Professor n. Someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:
    Enclosed is our latest version of MS #85-02-22-RRRRR, that is, the re-re-re-revised version of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the goddamned running head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even your bloodthirsty reviewers.

    I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some sort of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over hapless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren't reviewing manuscripts they'd probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask her or him to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them, the review process could be unduly delayed.

    Some of the reviewers' comments we couldn't do anything about. For example, if (as reviewer C suggested), several of my ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved and benefited. For example, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to do this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

    One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions #13-28 by reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he or she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions by other reviewers.

    We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers sends to your journal.

    Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked this paper much better the way we originally wrote it but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle, restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir-fried vegetables. We couldn't, or wouldn't, have done it without your input.

Sincerely,

(By Roy F. Baumeister and published in Dialogue; there's a response at Eli Brandt 's web page at Carnegie-Mellon.)