My own office!

One of the perks of my new job is that I get an office to myself. The staff at MOHAI has expanded over the years and there are a lot of people crammed into places intended for just one or two. In fact, I think that other than me the only people who have their own offices are the director, the deputy director, the head of advancement, and the head librarian (and her walls are glass so it barely counts). Anyone else at my level in another department can only dream of space to themselves.

Clearly though, part of the reason I have my own office is that no one else is eager to steal the space. It is a little cinder-block corner with poor lighting and a shared wall with the freight elevator. There are a bunch of pipes running along the ceiling and once my predecessor got rained on when one of them burst.

As fate would have it, I was exiled from this private paradise for the first two months on the job. On my first day my boss tried to get me set up on the computer in there and when she went to check the internet connection, the cable thingy just fell apart in her hand. What followed was a tech support comedy of errors and I basically just ended up working on a different computer in a different area. It happened to be the same desk and computer that I had worked at two years ago, so it felt like I had just returned to my old life. I actually didn’t mind it too much, but the two heads of my department lobbied hard to get me back in my office. It was very kind of them, but I sometimes wonder if my innate chattyness was making them weary of sharing a space with me.

Whatever the motive, I did finally get a new computer, and last Wednesday I moved into the office. Grim as that space is, I am pretty excited to have it. I’ve brought in my books and notebooks from grad school, and done my best to arrange the army of lamps that my predecessor left behind. The internet still doesn’t really work in there, but at least I can start putting up my pictures of John Doyle Bishop.