Do It Yourself

From an unnamed university in the greater San Francisco Bay Area...

Coming back to work on Mondays is never fun, but coming back after an amazing 3 day weekend in one of the most beautiful places on Earth is just painful. My long Yosemite weekend was a complete dream and I hated to leave.

Officemate isn't here today so I'm all alone in our newly painted office, watching a workstudy student assemble Ikea furniture. Our new office is really coming together and people have finally stopped commenting on how ugly they think the new yellow paint is (it looks great; they're crazy) and noting, enviously, that our office is coming together well and has the potential to become "the hippest place on campus."

My friend M is amused that I am sitting at my computer while my workstudy puts my office furniture together. "Personally, I don't know how you can stop yourself from jumping in. I love me an alan wrench." But that's the hierarchy of our office as far as I'm concerned. I'm my boss's bitch; these 19-22 year olds are mine. It's the office food chain. My boss is SUPER into maintaining the chain of command around here and will never do anything she doesn't feel is within her sphere of importance and I'm afraid that mentality is contagious.

Our dean, however, is the consummate populist and doesn't see things that way. He refuses to sit in the fancy dean's office, preferring the small, stuffy one he held for years as a professor. This morning, he came in and said "S, I got this email asking questions about our program for accreditation. I don't have time to respond; could I send it to you?" "Yes, you're the dean. You can just tell me what to do. Just forward me any emails you want me to handle." "Well that wouldn't be very nice of me!"

No, Dean, I guess it wouldn't. You're a good person. I gotta go pick up an alan wrench.