Why the Submit Button

When I was writing my grant proposal this past fall, I knew that at some point I would have to submit the thing. As per most forms, even the very formal ones such as grant proposals, this occurs online, and at the end of the form, at the end of the pages and pages of budget items, budget descriptions, grants received and currently held, the personal data, the proposal itself, formatted to within an inch of its life...at the end of the weeks of agony and the almost all-nighters and the full all-nighter and everything else, lies the submit button.

And you have to push it, if you want the proposal to go where it's supposed to go.

This action, of pointing the mouse to a little red rectangle with the word "submit" in the centre of it, and pushing the mouse button, or pressing the finger pad or whatever it is you do to get the computer to do what you want, is terrifying. Once the document is submitted, there's no more editing. There are no more chances to take it back and fix one crucial sentence which, if left as is, will destroy your career. You don't get to pull it back and redraw that one little molecule where you were distracted enough to put boron where you meant nitrogen. (For those of you not chemically literate, this is a big deal. Nitrogen and boron do not do the same things, even if they are next to each other on the keyboard and only three doors down from each other in the periodic table. Those extra couple of electrons that nitrogen has? All the difference in the world.)

So the idea of pushing the submit button, it is scary. It can make your life very complicated, or, if you're shopping instead of writing a grant proposal, it can bring one or two of the seven wonders of the world to your door, for a price. Pushing the submit button can make you spend gobs of money you don't actually have. It's very powerful, but it's easy to control. It's a love/hate relationship. I love to get rid of the grant proposal for example, and I'll hate myself when it's done and I don't get to talk about the agony it caused any more...I just have to wait and wait and wait for months to see if the powers that be like it well enough to give me money to continue my work. If they don't, then they'll be very clear about why, and I can already hear the reasons, or at least, the biggest reason: I don't publish enough.

I don't publish enough because it is more agony to write up the work and submit it (again!!) to referees who will trash it; I defeat myself before I even sit down to work. It's an excellent tactic but it doesn't get the bucks.

Anyway, this is a train ride I didn't want to get on. Suffice to say that I went around saying "I haven't pushed the submit button" and "I'm afraid to push the submit button" so much this past fall that it turned into a good blog title. And you know, it can mean whatever you want.
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No change in BF1's pere, we still wait for the end.