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Fourth-time's The Charm?
Moving My Wife's Office, One More Time.
My wife and I moved her office at the University last Sunday for the fourth and hopefully last time.
In all fairness, we didn't have to move her. The University had personnel scheduled to move her and several other faculty from her department on January 14.
However, I'm not sure where the movers were during her other moves. Maybe the University has some program that if you move offices 3 times, the fourth move gets help.
In any case, since my wife and I had placed a carpet remnant in Office #3 to hide a sizable stain on the existing carpet, personally moving her to Office #4 seemed like the best course of action. It's a lot easier to remove a remnant if nothing is sitting on top of it.
My wife's four offices have all been in the Grauel Language Arts building on the corner of Pacific and Normal.
Her first office was a closet.
I'm only slightly kidding. Most closets don't have a window, but that one did. It was a west-facing 6' by 6' room on the top floor of Grauel. While the window was a somewhat nice amenity, it contributed to turning the closet into an oven in the afternoon. It also didn't help that the air-conditioning barely worked.
The room was so small that when a student needed to talk with my wife, he or she had to sit in a chair in the doorway. No kidding.
Office #2 was the closet on the second floor of Grauel directly below Closet #1. One of her colleagues was moving from it to a bigger office within the domain of the department. My wife moved to Closet #2 essentially to reserve it for her department.
One can't relinquish office space once you've been assigned it, no matter how small. That is the rule.
Closet #2 was identical to Closet #1. Well, actually the heating worked better in Closet #2.
Much better. It ran year round.
And the air conditioning never worked.
To better fit her computer into the limited space, we bought a small hutch from Wal-Mart. But it was so hot and humid in Closet #2 that the laminate on the piece started to peel after less than a semester.
Shame on Wal-Mart for not selling furniture that can be used in the Yucatan!
When the River Campus was finally finished in the summer of 2007, the Theatre department vacated a number of offices in Grauel. My wife got one of those newly available spaces -- Office #3 for those who are counting -- with three times the square footage of either of her two previous closets.
However, she got it as-is. No university personnel were brought in to spruce up any of these offices. I guess they were too busy completing punch-list work at the then soon-to-be-opened River Campus.
So my wife and I had to deal with the previously mentioned stained carpeting and the scuffed up walls with numerous holes.
However, there were fewer heating problems with this office since apparently half the radiator was missing. And the air conditioning was pretty lackluster.
But two to three people could actually be in Office #3 at the same time with the door shut, so that was progress.
The carpet stain in the middle of the room was a complex blotch that morphed from a darkish spill to a sun-bleached raspberry in the middle of a field of purple. It was pretty hideous carpeting by almost anyone's standard. We hid it with a remnant from Lowes. Gnomes apparently took care of fixing and repainting the walls. Office #3 was presentable.
Then, this past fall the University decided to split up my wife's department, undoing a merger that occurred a few years ago.
It was concluded that my wife's department needed to consolidate departmental faculty who were spread out within Grauel. The University found money to construct some offices in an old Theater department space on the first floor. This was before the current financial crunch.
And so my wife got to pick Office #4.
The HVAC system seems to work properly in this one, so that's a big plus. She even got to choose the paint for the walls. Sure, it was only a palette of 3 colors, but it's the principle that matters.
And she has brand new carpeting.
Which has no stains.
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