In the hall more or less right outside my office door is a machine that wasn’t there yesterday, something called a ForceAir that is I presume vacuuming air from the room on the far side of the wall into a tube that’s got to be at least 2 feet in diameter and pumping it who-knows-where; I’m not curious enough to follow it up the escalator. The sound of the machine is OK, it’s a steady whisp like a humidifier, but the accompanying noises have got to go.
They’re knocking part of the wall down, with sledgehammers it feels like, and the machine is (I presume, and hope) taking away all the nasty concrete dust and whatever to somewhere we won’t have to breathe it. The frame of this building is entirely cinderblock and taking out even a small portion of it is likely to be a time-consuming, noisy and generally disruptive process. At least it sure as fuck is this morning. And, as usual, nobody had the courtesy to tell us it was about to happen.
Yet another reason to be glad I’m just about out of here. I forget that every summer workmen swarm over one or more parts of campus, tearing them apart and rebuilding before the students return. My first summer here you’ll recall they took out the acoustical ceiling tiles on several floors after classes ended and didn’t put them back in until the week before the fall semester began. That just plain sucked, along with all the drilling in the wall that accompanied whatever work necessitated such wholesale tile removal (oh yeah, something about the sprinkler system...). Faculty can flit in and out all summer long, and they do, but 8-5 staff have to grin and bear it.
Or not. As the case may be.
What I’ve learned in four short years at UT is that if you work with faculty nothing ever really changes short-term. They do the same damn thing every damn year, or maybe on a two-year cycle, and for them one year rolls into the next and it’s not conducive to developing much of a sense of time and unfortunately it’s contagious. Even for staff your job is never really going to change unless someone retires and the replacement is modern-minded (true to some degree of FNG) or someone gets a whole lot of grant money and decides to spend it on things that are going to affect you. Otherwise it’s drone city – just like the machine out in the hallway.
Maybe if I stuck around longer I’d see there’s more to the picture than this. I’ve heard rumors that the department head is going to step down in the next couple of years, which since Nadine’s his pet might have a major effect on staff management (or more accurately non-management). I’ve also heard other rumors that the large and wealthy department we share the building with is moving to another building during roughly the same time-span, meaning when they're gone my soon-to-be-former department might be able to consolidate in one area rather than being scattered throughout four floors the way it is now. This could conceivably mean (the rumormonger suggested) that staff could be repurposed from supporting isolated faculty groups, meaning mostly cleaning up the messes they leave behind, to concentrating on specialties by member – one person for purchasing for the whole department, one for the web, one for printed material, etc.
Sound good? Yeah, in fact it does. But I’m sure it won’t happen quite like that, and I won’t be here even if it does. My first day on the road I plan to bullet out of Austin so I camp that night somewhere, anywhere, on the far side of the Texas state line. And not cross it again until I come get my stuff out of storage, whenever that’s going to be or if I even do at all. My apologies to all my friends reading this who are staying put and to Austin-boosters everywhere, but (to clumsily mangle one of Donald Fagen’s more heartfelt lyrics): “California tumbles into the sea – that’ll be the day I go back to Austin-dale.”
That first day of bulleting is going to be a bitch, though. Texas, in case you weren’t aware, is a fucking big state and any direction you go from Austin you have a long trip out of it. I’m doing this mostly for the symbolic value, because that’s just the way I roll. At least when I’m getting started.
After that I’m going to focus on a more leisurely average of 200 miles a day. Got my route roughly mapped out and everything: OK, AR, TN, NC, SC, NC again, VA, PA, NY and some if not all of the New England states after that. I love spending time with maps.
Not so much with budgets and projections, which I’ve also been doing a lot of the last few days. Upshot is I see I’m not going to have as much financial latitude as I’d like, but I knew that already. I’m going to get in at least two and maybe three good months on the road before starting to scrape, and that’s all that counts right now.
That and employing some protection against the pounding in the hallway. It’s a good day at work when you can wear an iPod at your desk and nobody’s going to give you any shit about it.
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