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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It was a good way to spend the last 1\/2 hour before the long weekend.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In the span of a week we got:<\/p>\n
1. A woman trying to track down her husband’s lover.
\n2. Someone trying to track down information about their father – and prove their mother was lying.
\n3. Someone wanting to know if it was possible for a shadow to travel faster than the speed of light.
\n4. And a message that simply said, “I’LL F*@KING KILL YOU ALL!” (I forwarded that one to the police – just in case.)<\/p>\n
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…<\/p>\n
Angry. Uninformed and Angry. Crazy. Creepy. Misguided. Maybe Dangerous. And all of them highly opinionated.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So, I sat quietly in the dark. Answering calls and questions as the week wore down. And specifically not going through that email.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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