Welcome to FART 5

 

Yesterday it was only my one coworker and myself on campus, and he gave me Christmas gifts: hand soap in a pretty container and a bottle that looks like champagne, only it's full of chocolate truffles. I tore off the top, thinking it opened like a real champagne bottle, but the plastic underneath was smooth... and then I realized the bottom unscrewed. Whoops! 

I was on campus on a Tuesday for a meeting. It's a committee I used to be on, but I rotated off just before they started talking about the ARTs. As I may have mentioned, they are going to move some of us administrative staff into groups that they were calling pods... but then we started calling ourselves Pod People. So they changed the name to SLACs (I cannot remember what that stood for)... so then we started calling ourselves Slackers. Now they are Administrative Regional Teams, or ARTs, and there are three kinds: grant administration ARTs (GAARTs?), Payroll ARTs (PARTS, I suppose), and I am in a financial ART, or... FART. (Though one faculty member did say it could be a Fine ART.) Nobody on the committee in the college is affected by this, and the Chair of the University Staff committee said we really need shared governance representation, so I said I'd go. The meeting yesterday was apparently part Christmas party, because there were all sorts of treats there, and yes, I might have indulged. There were also fancy flavored waters, so I had one of those too... and then toward the end of the meeting, I really had to recycle that fancy flavored water. The meeting room had a back door, so I snuck out of that... and two guys were painting the other side. Who paints the doors of a meeting room while there's a meeting going on?? We surprised each other, and then when I emerged from the bathroom, one of the painters said I couldn't go back in using that door, so I had to use the front door and scootch around everyone till I got back to my seat toward the back of the room. Embarrassing! Then I went for a vigorous walk with my colleague that maybe burned off a fraction of those treats.

I had been feeling in fine fettle all day, but all of a sudden around two I began to feel crappy. I stuck it out but called in sick to Adoration. I did drag myself to the co-op to buy fancy truffles for my coworkers. Last night was not my best night of sleep, since I could barely breathe, but I was already up when my alarm went off this morning, so I got up and went to work... and then realized I had no voice. My boss gave me homemade treats, and the other coworker knows me well - look at the tote bag she gave me!

She also gave me soap and chocolate peppermint bark, and the chair gave me chocolate truffles too. (Plus I did buy some for myself when buying them for my coworkers.) The young coworker who is not too far out of college was working remotely for some reason, so we all left her stuff on her desk - who knows when she come in and get it? At least chocolate takes a while to go bad. Here is the soap dispenser my one coworker gave me.

And this is the woven paper basket I made at one of the parties last week at work.

I was looking forward to a quiet day of updating a spreadsheet for a couple of faculty members... and then my reminder went off to tell me we were having the inaugural meeting of FART 5, the Humanities FART. I was wearing a hoodie, thinking I wouldn't see anyone but coworkers today, and of course I had no voice when I had to introduce myself. At least one person I know who should be in FART 5 wasn't at the meeting, and she's furious about the FARTs so I don't know if she just skipped it in protest or if she's already on vacation. (My colleague messaged me to ask where this other woman was, and I said I didn't know.) In this meeting they kept talking about the ARTs, and it's a good thing I'm hoarse or I might have said, "Don't you mean the FARTs?" At least the meeting was remote, so I didn't have to leave my office, and that meant no Christmas treats - is that a good or a bad thing? I've had more than enough sugar in the last two weeks.

Famous Hat