What I wrote several months ago: I really like my research projects but I am chronically impeded in them by my unhappiness as a professor. As a professor I have tended to have jobs and lived in places that were not only professionally unsatisfying but also psychically unsafe for me. Repressing my flight instinct is always the first order of the day, and sometimes it takes hours.
What has always gone into that unhappiness is that I have almost always had 6-8 of the following going on at once: 1. Living in empty/stifling small towns [at more than one institution, I point out]. 2. Not always having enough gas and other money to get away. 3. Believing one must accustom oneself to this. 4. Being surrounded with graduate students and assistant professors who are drama addicts. 5. Being surrounded with other professors who are relentlessly suburban. 6. Having to deal with Extreme Sexism from one’s students, colleagues, and institution. 7. Having colleagues who are emotional vampires. 8. Having other colleagues who are verbally abusive. 9. Having department chairs who delegate everything elsewhere and do nothing. 10. Having department chairs who micromanage and/or are directly corrosive and destructive.
What my original post said next: Yet my research projects are really fascinating. When I can reduce the time spent each day processing pain so as to put more into actual work, work then helps make the pain recede. This is only easy at present when I am at least a hundred miles from my office. It is yet easier if I am also out of the Old Dominion, and it is easiest if I am out of the country.
What I notice right now: the current chair of my main department actually takes responsibility for what goes on and does not spread gossip, yet also does not make unilateral, uninformed, or secret decisions. This is extremely unusual. I always knew such a situation would make a great difference in one’s quality of life, but I did not realize how great the difference would be.
This chair, for example, is dealing with that Blackguard, so I am not having to do so. That is one of the reasons why today is Labor Day.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
It’s amazing how much efficiency and good will in administration is underestimated. It really is everything. Yet it is entirely uncommon.
Very oddly uncommon, I must say. But it really is everything.
In my entire work life I have had two good administrators.
The rest were no good at all, but for some reason they thought they were. Their chief flaw as a rule was that they enjoyed making people afraid of them. And they tended to be kind of superficially competent but dumb.
Yes. I could say a great deal about that type. But actually, administration can be really creative, and leadership is a real skill, and so on.