Author: anthony Page 28 of 72

Someone forgot to remind me that I’m an adult this past weekend.

I was camping with my folks and my sister and her family for an early father’s day visit. They had a tent set up for me when I got there early Saturday morning and I spent much of the day hanging out with my nieces and visiting with the folks. We played games and rode bikes and in the afternoon we went to a nearby playground.

While my nieces played on the jungle gym, I tried the climbing wall. The wall curved up from the ground and then went out a bit horizontally. It wasn’t very high up and I was doing okay on it – but my feet were too big for the footholds and I started to lose my footing. I decided to just drop off and figured I’d let go with my feet first and then hang there for a moment by my hands before dropping off.

Instead of just dangling there when I let go with my feet, I instead slammed forward chest first into the wall. And then I dropped.

I lost most of my breath for a moment and tried to play it cool so that I wouldn’t alarm anyone – and so I wouldn’t be embarrassed by my stupid move.

Once I got my breath and realized I was hurting, I checked in with my brother-in-law and my dad for their advice. We all three decided that it might be a bruised or cracked rib – but there’s not much that can be done about it anyway.

I took it easy and tried to shake it off. We went for ice cream and then back to the campsite for dinner and games.

When it was time for sleep, though, I had a bit of a rough time. I was hurting and the sleeping bag and air mattress weren’t really cutting it. Fortunately, I was so tired from the day that I got a good amount of sleep anyway.

On Sunday I started to learn my limits. Sitting was okay as was standing. Breathing shallow worked and a slow walk was okay. Running, standing up, sitting down, breathing deep and twisting were all bad. Lifting heavy things was really bad. Sneezing and coughing? Agony.

The drive home was okay – I didn’t move around much in the car – and if I was careful I wasn’t too bad.

Monday and today at work, though, showed my limits. I was struggling as I moved around and it wasn’t getting better. Finally, today, I left work at 2:00 to head to ER to get an X-Ray.

I waited patiently and did a little paper folding in the exam room. The nurse practitioner poked and prodded at my ribs and then squeezed my back and chest at the same time. It hurt so bad I nearly fall over – an indication of a break or a crack.

I got an x-ray and waited some more – then they came back and said they didn’t see a crack but it might have been too small to show up. The NP gave me some meds for the pain. As I took the blue pills I asked if they were going to send me back into the Matrix.

He didn’t get it.

They said I needed to keep working on deep breathing so that my lungs would n’t get fluid accumulated in them – which could lead to pneumonia. I got a plastic device that I have to use hourly while I’m awake and it’s going to be a rough couple weeks while I heal up.

Could have been a lot worse and I hope I learned something from this.

Knowing me, though, I’m not so sure.

Our four offices at work have been pretty toasty the past week or so. At one point, it hit 80 degrees in my office. Great if you’re outside by a beach – kinda miserable if you’re in dress pants and a long sleeved shirt.

We couldn’t figure out why the entire rest of the office complex had full blown air conditioning and in our offices, the air wasn’t even moving.

My boss asked me to check with the physical facilities department and open a work order. I dutifully checked all the offices for temperature variances, determined the room numbers, and called it in. A few hours later, 2 guys from the physical plant show up and walk into my co-worker’s office. They walk out seconds later as the air conditioning kicks in with a rush of cool air.

One of the guys says to me, “the thermostat was set on heat,”

Mortified, I walk in to my co-workers office and see the thermostat on the wall next to his light switch.

He says, “I had it turned down to 65 and it didn’t do anything,”

I barely spare him a glance as I flip down the cover and show him the clearly marked switch – now set on “cool” instead of “heat”.

I thanked the physical plant guys as I went back to my office and they remarked that the easy ones were a nice way to end the day.

Then I stood in my office for a moment with my eyes closed, trying to tamp down the fury. Terribly busy day, overheated and stressed, and I was livid.  And, frankly, embarrassed on behalf of the entire planet.

I opened my eyes and I could have sworn that the unimaginable stupid was so intense that it nearly crystallized right out of the air.

I would have put it in a box if it had. I’m pretty sure I could have found a use for a solid crystal of pure stupid.

How does one get to a point in their adult life where they’ve never seen how a thermostat works? And even if they have never seen one, wouldn’t you think that one second of investigation might have been warranted?  That is literally how long it took for me to determine there was a cover and open it.

For a very brief moment, I tried to blame myself for not checking his office for a thermostat – but then I realized that there is an upper limit to how much thinking I’m willing to do for other people. And that was clearly beyond it.

I got a little exercise this evening and I’m feeling a little more relaxed. A little, anyway. I think I need to play some really violent video games, take a cold shower, and go to bed.

Tomorrow, at least, the office will be cooler.

The day started out with an email with documents about the special board of trustees’ meeting – and the resignation of the university’s president.

It was a surprise – but not really a surprise. He made a number of unpopular and mostly terrible decisions over time and had a lot of distracting controversy.  Many of those decisions had been reversed – but the controversy remained.

The announcement swept campus even before the rest of the official notes came out and was all over social media in a heartbeat. Over the course of the day, I saw more and more notes online from people and a general sense of relief.

A couple of offices had cake.

I was concerned about the recovery in the long term and the short term transition.

Most troubling – beyond how long it took to get to this point and the damage already done – was a “golden parachute”.

Full salary and benefits for the next 120 days while he makes a decision on what he wants to do next. Then it’s either a year’s salary payout – nearly 1/2 million dollars – or a 5 year teaching position in the college of business. Oh, and moving expenses for when he moves out of the university-provided mansion.  Nice if you can get it.

He resigned/got fired because he didn’t do a good job and things got worse under his tenure. And even in failure, he’s treated like a departing king.

A far cry from those that were part of the cuts last fall. Some of those folks got nothing other that an escort off the campus. No free housing or months for a decision. And no job lined up and waiting for them.

It’s not isolated to UA or higher education or even America. Old rich white guys helping keep other old rich white guys… rich. Some weird kind of status quo – once you get there, systems are in place to keep you there. No matter how badly you screw up.

Disappointing, but not surprising.

In the meantime, I’m feeling a little more secure in my job – if only because more layoffs at this point would be devastating and everyone is going to be too distracted for quite a while to do anything that major.

The summer will likely prove busy and strange as the university tries to figure out what’s next.

We got word today that we could leave early – it being a holiday weekend and all. I could have left at 3:45, but since the switchboard needed to stay open, it meant that my co-worker – who is usually there til we close up shop – wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of the early dismissal. Plus, the operators on duty would have been stuck there as well.

I thought about it for a moment – but only a moment. If given an opportunity to volunteer to help out, I’ll usually do it. So, I told my co-worker we could leave early and told him I would cover til the end of the day. I then shut down my computer and told the operators I would finish out the day for them and they could leave early too.

The office got even quieter as I settled in and answered the few calls before we closed at 4:30 for summer hours. The lights in the room were flickering a bit and I turned them off – then did some writing in between calls in the light of the monitors.

It was a good way to spend the last 1/2 hour before the long weekend.

One of the side projects I’ve been working on has been to compile a list of the strangest messages we’ve gotten sent to the webmaster@uakron.edu email. I’m not the webmaster, but I do answer that mail – and we get some strange ones.

In the span of a week we got:

1. A woman trying to track down her husband’s lover.
2. Someone trying to track down information about their father – and prove their mother was lying.
3. Someone wanting to know if it was possible for a shadow to travel faster than the speed of light.
4. And a message that simply said, “I’LL F*@KING KILL YOU ALL!” (I forwarded that one to the police – just in case.)

Going back through that archive of messages over the past year showed me hundreds and hundreds of simple, polite requests or questions. And every so often…

Angry. Uninformed and Angry. Crazy. Creepy. Misguided. Maybe Dangerous. And all of them highly opinionated.

I tried not to let it get to me. This is only a small cross section of the emails that account gets and such a small sample of the population as to be negligible. Still, it says something that of all the things these folks could be doing, they took the time to send a stranger a message full of their anger, their hate, and their own special brand of dangerously crazy.

So, I sat quietly in the dark. Answering calls and questions as the week wore down. And specifically not going through that email.

I’ll see family this weekend and I’ll enjoy the day off next week. And on Tuesday I’ll pick back up that email account and route messages to admissions, financial aid, the office of the registrar – and figure out how to deal with the intermittently strange ones. Someday, it will make for an compilation.

Last weekend was Mother’s day and on the following Monday I headed out to visit the Ladies of New York. The younger and her son (my former room-mater) are “intermittently estranged” and I didn’t want Mother’s day to pass her by without a card. I stopped over after work had cards for both of them. We talked for a bit, I bragged on my nieces, and they both commented on how gray I was getting.

Sigh. At least they didn’t call me fat like last time. They really have no filters.

On the bright side, they both appreciated the visit and the cards.  So, good deed done.

—————-

I’m proceeding with the decrapification of my house and got some old electronics cleared out. Most went to the Akron Computer Recycling Center – which involved multiple phone calls, two trips to Barberton, and a shop that looked like a Radio Shack had exploded. But, they wouldn’t take the TV.

I had heard that Best Buy had a recycling program – but with a catch. They would only take TV’s off your hands if you paid a recycling fee of $25.

Sigh. So, I took it in and then went to the service desk and paid the fee. Something about EPA regulations, I guess. It was annoying, but worth it to make a little more progress.

Today, I’ve been cleaning out closets and getting a few more bags ready to recycle.

——————-

And I’ve needed the mental clearing as well. The past week of work was kinda rough. Felt like a losing battle – everything was more difficult than it needed to be and more complicated than it should have been. By Wednesday, I had reached a ‘weapons-grade irritability”

And then things… got a little better. Thursday morning, a few things went right and got less complicated. Friday was a quiet day and I got a lot done. I had to stay and close up the switchboard, but even that – while kind of annoying – wasn’t that bad.

The weekend has been quiet as well – lots of reading, movies, and video games. This afternoon, got a birthday party to go to that should be fun.

Still, I need to take some time off. Maybe find a few days here and there and just chill out. And later in the summer, I need to find a beach.

My parents are now living in a small community just outside of town and as such, they are allowed to have chickens.  Much to the delight of my nieces.

I got into work this morning to an email that one of the operators had called off. Hmm… okay, well, we can get through this. I checked my voice-mail and found that another had also called off.

So, we had one on the schedule for 2 hours in the morning and 1.5 hours in the afternoon. My co-worker who is usually my back-up was also off today.

I also had a meeting at 11, an off campus appointment for lunch, and a sore throat.

At 10:30 I had a hot pocket and a pop-tart and settled in to save the. FREAKING. DAY.

My 11:00 appointment was for a training session on our survey software. My colleague was patient with me and instead of being annoyed by the frequent/constant pauses to answer the switchboard, she was intrigued at the whole process.

Thank you, Susan, for being understanding.

We got through that and she headed out – and shortly there-after the headset I was using started to do the “the battery is dying” beep. Right around the time the program crashed. I switched stations and kept on going.

Call after call after call. It was a pretty steady stream all day. Lunchtime came and went.  Around 2:30 I finally decided to just let the damn phone ring and go to the bathroom. It was either that or I was going to literally wet my pants. I dropped the headset on the desk, ran down the hall to visit the urinal, then ran back to the switchboard – with a brief detour to get some hand-sanitizer.

Hey, I’m not a barbarian.

The operator on the schedule came in at 3:15 to take over and I went home to get “lunch”.

Trying to answer all those calls – and still keep up with my emails and regular work – really took it out of me. The cold didn’t help, but the sore throat did make my voice sound pretty amazing. It was heading towards Barry White at one point.

And it wouldn’t be a day on the switchboard without some weird calls. The worst was a woman who was calling in for her daughter. Her side of the conversation amounted to:

1. Her daughter sent an email to someone at UA.
2. Someone at a computer near the recipient took a photo of the screen with their phone.
3. That person then texted the daughter the picture and said that it was good that the email didn’t come to them because they would have done… something with it.
4. The daughter then reported this to HR for some reason.
5. A guy named Mike may have been involved. In some department. Maybe.

The woman wanted to know why no one at UA had gotten back to her daughter and what I was going to do about it.

The expression on my face – and the words that I mouthed – are primary reasons why I do not belong on Skype or Facetime.

What. The. %#@$

I mean, really? What in the multi-verse was this woman thinking? Based on that information – and she couldn’t come up with any more details than that – how was I going to provide any guidance for her at all?

For just the smallest moments, I was speechless. I literally could not come up with anything at all to say. And that’s rare.

And, yes, I’ve used the word “literally” twice in this post and I absolutely mean both of them.

I recovered, made some educated guesses and said some polite things, and then transferred her along with a hope and prayer.

Susan was impressed.

I took another moment to get that bit of crazy out of my system, then answered the next call with a soothing voice and a helpful attitude.

I was faking the attitude, but the caller didn’t hear it.

I actually took a sort of a nap when I got home, then got some dinner with Jim, and then home for another nap. And in a few minutes from now, shower and bed.

Yep – living the dream.

Or a simulation.

Wait…  That would actually explain a lot.

Jim and I went to IHOP tonight for dinner. It was a slow night and we were the only ones in our server’s section. He and I talked about our respective days and the server was chatty when she came around as well.

We finished our meals and the server came back over. She talked about how she’d dropped something in the lettuce bin and spilled a bunch of ice and made a mess.

Then she said, “Mind if I ask how old you guys are?”

Not really sure where this was going, I replied,

“43”

“Oh,” she said, “Well, I’m not even going to ask you,” she said to Jim and was off again to get us the check.

It took me a minute to process what had happened. She wasn’t just making conversation. She was trying to find out – in the bluntest way possible – if either of us qualified for the senior discount. Since the “obviously older” of the two of us was 43, she figured that was it and did not give us any percentage off.

Jim, who is a bit older than I am, could barely contain his mirth. I glowered.

When the she came back over I told her, “For the record, he’s older than me”.  Because I was feeling petty – you got a problem with that?

She asked how old he was and Jim didn’t want to say. She then joked about not feeling old herself, but her 34 year old daughter made her feel old.

We paid the check and went to the car where, at my urging, Jim looked up when a senior discount kicks in at IHOP. The answer?

55.

She thought I looked at least 55.

Are you shitting me? I do not look 55. A little gray hair and suddenly I’m pushing around a walker.

55, my ass. Which, speaking of, could pass for a 20 year old’s.

I was in a bit of snit the rest of the evening and we called it an early night. I mean, yes, she meant well and was trying to save us a little money, but 55?

You can’t see it from there, but I’m scowling.

Senior discount… grumble, grumble.

I got my first gray hair at 18, started losing my hair in my early thirties, and got a “welcome to AARP” card in my mid 30’s.  Yeah, thank you.

And if anyone makes a “golden buckeye” joke, prepare to be kicked in the nuts. Yeah, it’s like that.  And yeah, it’s gotta be like that.

Now I’m going to go play some Minecraft and listen to some dubstep while I do it.

55.

I read an article online last night about more cuts at the university. In this case, it took the form of faculty members that did not get their contacts renewed. Not because they weren’t excellent teachers. Just… because. It sounds like they are being offered adjunct positions – with fewer benefits and a cut in salary so extreme as to be insulting.

Also heard that the dining services has taken another hit – but since those folks were ones that had been transitioned to an outside company, it doesn’t ‘quite’ count.

Cutting faculty – or however this is being spun – is pretty dangerous for a university. If you are fighting a drop in enrollment, getting rid of faculty looks – and is – bad for the students.

I’m sad and disappointed. And, once again, I’m afraid for my job.

——————————

I was in a hurry today and went to Wendy’s for lunch.

And I got carded.

I had paid with my debit card and the cashier needed to see my ID. Apparently, this location has had a lot of problems with fraudulent cards and this was the remedy.

I handed her my ID and she scrutienized it, then handed it back. My food came out shortly there-after and I checked it to see if the sandwich was right – it was – and I was on my way.

Feeling a bit like a criminal.

This is like paying with a $20 and having the clerk check it with special anti-counterfeit marker.

Or having to remove your shoes at the airport. Or sit through that Anti-priacy FBI message on every FREAKING DVD EVER.

The most law abiding of us are being treated like criminals left and right. Not by other people – exactly – but by systems that are then run by people. There may have been some good idea behind these things at one time, but now they are so ingrained that the idea of getting rid of them causes some kind of collective panic.

Instead of making things safer, we just end up with more clever criminals. And everyone else is just a little bit guilty all the time by association.

——————-

My de-clutter and de-crapification is continuing. I’ve been doing some yard work when it’s light out and then working on boxes and crates of “stuff” in the evening.

Progress is slow, but adding just a bit of order to the day has been good for me. My place is kind of a mess while I go through things, but I’m creating an underlying order that is strangely reassuring.

It’s also a lot of personal honesty. Will I wear that again? No. Can I use that bit of junk for something else? No. Do I really need 2 back-up keyboards. Seriously, no.

One back-up is enough.

It’s an exercise in concentrating on what matters. And I think that’s important. So easy to get distracted by so much all the time… a little mindfulness and attention can made a difference.

Or at least it does for me. I’m not really de-stressed or suddenly giddy at work, but I’m maybe finding a little perspective.