Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Have You Got My Dolly?

 

Today I worked on campus, and my colleague and I took a walk at lunch on the Lakeshore Path. As I waited for her to join me, I gazed out over the lake and saw a sailboat tip right over. Not sure if that was an accident, or if it was part of a sailing class, because back in the day when I took sailing lessons, we had to purposely capsize our boats and then stand on the keel to pop them back up. Hard to believe now, but I failed at this back in college because I literally did not weigh enough to get my boat back up. I should take sailing lessons now - that sucker would pop right back up!

Later I had to take a case of paper to Religious Studies. (They had asked for a ream, but I figured they really wanted a case, because how long is a ream going to last you? They said I was right, they meant a case.) It was too heavy to carry, and someone stole the mailroom's dolly, so I had to use an awkward cart that was not at all easy to steer. I called Hardingfele, who works in the building next door, because it's connected to the building where Religious Studies is, and their building has stairs to get into it. She came to help me, but we could not figure out how to get from her building to the other building, so we ended up carrying the case of paper up the stairs. How do handicapped people get into this building? How is this even legal?? I don't think I blogged about this, but because the mailroom dolly is MIA, my coworker borrowed one from French and Italian. His equivalent in that department brought it up, and we were all laughing about how his coworker (my equivalent) wrote "French and Italian" on the dolly in three different places. It reminded me of when I was very young and worked in the private sector, and this girl even younger than I was sent an email to the entire company (including the president) saying: "Someone took Marketing's wastebasket. Has anyone seen it? It says R&D on it." We were all thinking, "Have you checked with R&D maybe?" It's possible she didn't realize that stands for Research and Development and that it's a different department; maybe she thought those were just some random letters on her wastebasket, but still, someone from Marketing must have stolen it from R&D first, so maybe they just took it back. Anyway, I told the other two this story, and the guy from French and Italian said I needed to email my equivalent in his department (I know her well) and say, "Have you seen German , Nordic, and Slavic's dolly? It says 'French and Italian' on it!" She knew immediately that I was being silly, and then I told her the story, and she said, "Oh, that's funny!"

We always have our department staff meetings on Wednesday at ten, but today our boss said we were going to have it at three on the Union Terrace over a pitcher of beer. That was a lot of fun, and then I hung out by myself until Travalon got there, and we had cheeseburgers and corn on the cob. It was a gorgeous evening, and the sailboats were out with their spinnakers up. Just once I'd love to be on a sailboat using its spinnaker...

One evening at Night Prayer I was talking about how Travalon likes to watch web cam videos from Florida because he's really into Florida panthers, and I said the panthers always ignore the cameras and seem to have something really important they have to do, but the black bears will stop and sniff and lick the cameras. I said I think I'm a bear, not a panther, and Anna Banana II made the astute observation that in the Myers-Briggs test, panthers would be very J for Judgmental, but bears would be very P for Perceptive. That makes sense, because I was very P on the Myers-Briggs test. Once someone was saying how very P I am, and I was getting sick of it, so I said, "Oh yes, I'm just full of P-ness." That shut her up - in fact, she got up and walked out of the coffee shop. She must be very J.


Famous Hat


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