Tuesday (It is Tuesday, right?) Afternoon Office Blues

I'm up at the office today after a very productive weekend and an evening out at a baseball that reminded me just how little I care about baseball. What I'm really wondering though is why is it that as soon as I walk in my office, that list of things I had in mind to do here fly out the window? It's a problem, right, that I can't be productive in my office?

It's funny to me because I remember in grad school the continuing quest to get to a smaller office. I started out (and ended) my grad career in a well-cubicled bullpen office. At one point there were twenty or so of us crowded in, using two computers and nine desks. When they put the cubicles in, I remember the grad director telling me how they thought it would make us feel important. I tried to explain that I left cubicles to return to grad school, and that no one feels important with a cloth-covered cork half-wall. Try stopping the Mongul hordes with that, I wanted to say, but didn't. I needed their approval for travel funding, after all.

Once, I briefly got to share a small, closet like office in the back of the building with two other graduate students. There was elation: at long last, I would be able to work undistracted (and I am oh-so-easily distractable when I want to be - and in grad school, I almost always was up for distraction). But the office was taken away from us, a couple of months in, to give to the department's new hire in charge of the alumni newsletter. But I'd never really unpacked. That sort of reward never really lasted there - only adjuncts might have been at the wrong end of the rope like grad students.

Really, though, there was a lot of joy in the large office. Pranks to be played - like hanging someone's prize action figure by paper clips from the ceiling - and fun to be had - like bourbon smoothies from the back computer desk/ad hoc bar. You hear interesting things in a bunker office. People have breakdowns. Hell, people cause breakdowns. People have epiphanies. That level of interest almost never happens in your closet-like single office. Oh, I suppose the nun-next-door had a breakdown when I played music of a certain persuasion, but it wasn't the same as the great collapse of '02 where a good friend was driven right 'round the bend by that action figure incident I mentioned, finding the need to take it up with the grad director and refrain for two weeks worth of Thursday night drinks. And no one ever stops in to cheer here because they've just made the critical turn on what they've spent a term trying to wrap their head around.

The office - my office - is supposed to have some element of status to it. But I've got plywood shelves on the wall. I don't get to control my own thermostat (though they gave me a fake one to play with). I have to store stuff for the department in here - old journals, mostly, and copies of the Chronicle. Last summer I came in to discover that the school had decided to take some of my furniture and replace it with other stuff. It was also seen as a status move, but it was interesting that "new furniture" was a rather loose signifier - lots of wiggle room and no consulting the person whose status it was supposed to bolster (or at least reflect). What did I get? A new chair for visitors and a hand-me-down lateral filing cabinet that I didn't really have room for to begin with.

Still, I'm left with the problem that once I open the door, all the things I planned to do run off around the corner and down the stairs to parts unknown. If you see my things-to-do playing stickball or joining the circus or whatever, tell them I miss them. Tell them I can't get along with them. Tell them I'm sorry that I neglected them, and I'll try to be better.

Ah, screw it. Tell them to have fun and to send a postcard now and then. But no cryptic hints. Those would only drive me crazy.