preparing for Dave’s Syndrome

Subtitled: It’s Hotter Than Heater in Hellmouth. And we’re on the low end of the temperature scale compared to most of the US. I really shouldn’t even mention it, when it’s so much worse in other places. Our highs have been hovering around 90 all week. That’s very unusual for us. Not that I’m complaining! Well, okay, I confess… even I am complaining at this point. Just a tiny bit. It’s very humid – when you walk outside it’s like walking into a load of hot, damp, half-dried laundry. Which immediately wraps around your face and suffocates you. Much as I love the heat, even I am admitting that it may actually possibly be just a tad too hot. It does not help that half of our offices are like a refrigerator, while the other half are little ovens. Mine is on the oven side- it’s 83 degrees right now in here. Supposedly the air conditioner is running – at least it’s roaring away right outside my window, which means I can’t actually open the window or the roar will drive me insane.  Our house is in pretty much the same temperature range, since we don’t have air conditioning. Just windows and fans. 

Still, still, I will take this over snow and temps in the teens any day. OH and since we do live in BipolarWeatherWorld, last Friday night I turned the heat on. Boy was I mad. I greatly prefer the overly warm weather to turning on the heat in July. 

Hey, if it gets to 88, we may all experience Dave’s Syndrome! Sadly Black Books won’t let me embed this, but it’s very funny. It’s also a big chunk of the entire episode- I couldn’t find just the part when Manny warns Bernard that if the temperature hits 88, he’ll be stricken with Dave’s Syndrome. At the moment, it’s 81, which made Baker B and I laugh and laugh. 81 is nothing!! It hits 81 inside our house at night – those wacky British! And oddly I’ve only just now wondered why they are using Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. At least I assume they are using F — 81C is 177.8 F, and they’d all be dead. Anyhow, we found it very funny that Londoners are melting when it’s 81F. That’s a pleasant summer day for us. 

Oh, look, there’s even a Wikipedia article about Dave’s Syndrome! Well, it’s part of an article about fictional diseases: 

Dave’s Syndrome
Black Books
A condition which is known to affect Manny, it is triggered by being exposed to a temperature of at least 88°F (31°C). While the exact effects of the disease are not described, a scene at the end of the episode shows the results — Manny is driven to madness and totally ransacks the area outside the shop, before using a hot water bottle as a loincloth, grabbing a flaming torch and painting "EAT ME" on his stomach, whilst jumping on the roof of an abandoned car. Bernard dismisses it as "attention-seeking</a> rubbish" throughout the episode.

It is probably obvious that I am bored absolutely out of my MIND at work lately. (Hence the mid-day OD entry).  It’s a little strange — we always do have down-time in the summer, but this summer our down-time is apparently going to last until fall session starts. I’m sure this is largely because we lost half of our departments last fall, when the new Health Sciences College was created. We just don’t have nearly as many students now, so don’t have nearly as much work to do. And we still have three of us doing it. I am very very nervous because we are about to experience some serious budget-hacking, which is going to include a lot of jobs being lopped off. The cuts will be all over campus, but my direct boss thinks one of us is a goner. "Goner" hopefully in the sense that someone will get moved to another department which is short a person (there will be a lot of actual jobs cut, but there will also be moving of people from one office to another, in all likelihood). I am relatively certain that Mr. Organized and I are safe, because we’ve been here the longest and do the most complicated things. I am afraid it will be Miss Artsy who gets sent away (hopefully just to another department and not axed). I WANT it to be Aggravation Receptionist, who does nothing but shop online and yak on her phone to her endless parade of drama-ridden family members all day long. But she’s been here longer than any of us, unfortunately. 

So that’s unnerving and doesn’t make me feel better about having nothing to do. When they created the Health Science college and we lost all those departments, I really expected one of us to get sent over there. Which would have made total sense. But no, they hired new people who then had to learn how to do what we’re already doing, and now, a year later, one of us will probably get cut. 

And to make things even grimmer, we have to move to our new offices week after next. Well, okay, that shouldn’t be grim, but… it kind of is. We all went over together on Monday to look at our new digs. And tried not to scream. We’re moving back to exactly where I used to be in my College of Ed Hell Job, so my response was tinged with Post Traumatic Stress Reaction. But nobody was very happy – honestly, it looked like we’d wandered into a minimum security prison. The carpet is filthy, half the lights are out, the ceiling tiles are coming down… it is not a pleasant place. On the plus side, they are supposed to be painting and fixing the ceiling and putting in new carpet (the carpet that’s there is only five or six years old – it was installed right before I left. I can not imagine what in the hell they did to it — it’s disgusting! And… it’s just an office, not a day-care center, so I have no idea how it got in such a state.) I’m also unhappy because I’m going from kind of being isolated and alone (which is really not always a good thing, but it is QUIET. At least when there’s no one watching TV or having a meeting right outside my door) to being right beside Aggravation Receptionist. So now I’ll get to experience what Miss Artsy and Mr. Organized have been enduring for the past year — her incessant yakking and personal phone calls and, well, aggravation. The only good thing is that our boss is also right beside her (both our offices open right onto the reception area where she and her draaaaama will be sitting) so maybe that will tone her down a bit. Miss Artsy and Mr. Organized are one room over- so there’s a wall between her and them. And hey, maybe she’ll be the one who gets sent elsewhere! Miss Artsy does her job most of the time for her anyhow, so it sure would make sense, but knowing how things go I’m sure it won’t be AR that gets axed. 

On the other plus side, my office has GREAT windows. Floor to ceiling on one wall. It’s tiny — 11 x 11 – but a little bigger than where I am now. Well, hey, I took a picture: 

I think everything in that photo will be going away, except the little chair and the small side table  but you can see how great the windows are. Especially once I raise those ugly blinds as far up as they’ll go.  

Well, I should attempt to get back to scrounging up projects that make me look indispensable.