Mild Curses and Wicked Witches Mellowing at Midlife

I arrived to campus yesterday to find that we had no phones and that there was water seeping up from between the wall and the  floor in one part of the hallway.  It had made quite a puddle overnight, but it seemed to taper off in the morning as we kept an eye on it.  I can't figure out what caused it--there's no plumbing nearby, but I don't know what may be running down the wall in terms of plumbing or ductwork.  The office on the other side of the wall was dry.

There are days I feel our campus is cursed.  It's not an old-school kind of curse:  no one's first born must be sacrificed, there's nothing that will haunt future generations.  But every day it seems that there is some kind of new challenge.

Yesterday I wrote a poem that's been in my head for a few weeks, a poem about a wicked witch in an enchanted forest who realizes that she's mellowed at midlife.  Once she would have brewed a potion to turn a snooty prince into a toad, but these days, she's brewing tea to soothe the weary soul.  Once she would have constructed cottages of gingerbread to lure children to their doom, and now, she tips the Amazon driver who brings her the exotic ingredients she can order online, so she has no need of children to bake in her oven.

I still need to work on it--that last bit doesn't work as well as the first.  But I like the general idea.

I thought of that witch late yesterday afternoon, when the UPS person arrived at my office door.  He had a big box.  We weren't expecting any packages, so I did double check to make sure that it was ours.  It was addressed to our IT guy.

Could it finally be the HDMI cables we'd been waiting on?  Some sort of device that would make our printer able to talk to our laptops?  We've been bringing our laptops from home, but that means that to print anything, we have to turn it into a PDF file, save it to a USB drive, and walk the USB drive to the printer.  It's fine for a document here or there, but it's extraordinarily cumbersome for the kinds of printing we used to do daily.

I pulled out one of the boxes that was packed inside a box to discover this:

I don't want to sound ungrateful.  I'm sure that these headphones are lovely, especially at one of our sister campuses, where everyone is working in a conference room to be able to access the mi fi hotspot device that gives us internet connectivity.  But at my campus, we are able to continue working in our individual offices, even if we have to close the door.

In terms of what the campus really needs, headphones would be very far down the list.  

I said to one of my colleagues, "If this was a scene in a movie, it would strain belief."  Campus requests laptops, HDMI cables, bluetooth devices to enhance connectivity--and we get headphones for people who are working in individual offices who have no need of headphones.  Maybe one of the other campuses got our cables and connectivity devices.

What makes me think that we aren't cursed--or what breaks the curse each day--is the patience and good humor of colleagues.  When one of us slumps in despair, the rest spring into action.  When one of us can't figure out how to rig together one more set of connections, someone else spots a solution.

I don't know how long we can limp along like this.  Part of me fully expects to be saying that week after week, year after year.  But we'll figure out a way to keep making a way.  We're educators, after all, low on the priority list, with non-existent budgets for supplies, creating magic out of curses.