(Belated) Bring Your Action Figure to Work Day

Friday, according to the internets, was Bring Your Action Figure to Work Day. I missed it in 2017, so I wanted to be sure to remember it in 2018, and stuck it on my calendar. Coincidentally, I also had a vacation day stuck on my calendar for Friday, so I missed the entire day, and decided to make up for it yesterday. As I did in 2016, I brought Northstar, and he seemed to find the whole thing as distasteful as he did last time he was here.



This is what you do? You talk on a phone all day?

Well, not all day. I mean, I talk on the phone a lot, but...

This is an actual job, that people are paid for? Why didn't you become a gay world champion downhill skier, like me? Or Gus Kenworthy? That's much more exciting.

I don't know. I'm not good at skiing.

Also, your office is messy.



You don't have a cup for these pens? You just fling them anywhere?

Well, I mean...



Why do you still have eclipse glasses on your desk? Are you saving them for the next eclipse? Are you, Joel?

Maybe?

It's half a decade away, Joel. You're going to go half a decade without cleaning your desk off?

Cleaning my desk off doesn't mean throwing everything on it away.

Is that a Hydra pin?

What?



Are you in Hydra, Joel? If I lean in, are you going to whisper, "Hail Hydra" to me?

No! Somebody gave that to me.

Sure. OK. That's why you still have it.



Why do those toys live in your office? They're not good enough for your apartment?

No. I like those toys. I just think they look good on the bookshelf.

Is that the lie your Hydra masters told you to tell?

No?

And this...



Why do you have a whole drawer full of stress balls, Joel?

Mostly for conversations like this.



And why are we even still here, having this conversation? It's after five.

I don't know, Northstar.

I don't know.

The Tangled Web We Weave Out of Dumpster Fire Neckties

There's a running joke at work, and on my Facebook, about the ways that people who contact me manage to misspell or mispronounce my name. You name the medium (phone, fax, email, hand-written note, etc.) and at least one person a week will refer to me as Jole, Jule, Troll, Charles, Joyle, or some other previously unimagined variation on the theme of "Joel", but there's one version that comes up most often: at least a hundred people in the last decade have referred to me as Jewel. In my head, I tend to hear it the same way Bette Davis hisses it in "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte" whenever she screeches about Jewel Mayhew.

I get called Jewel so often, usually in conjunction with some sad butchery of my last name, that last summer someone sent me this shirt:



They forgot to add a note, though, or the seller didn't let them, so I posted it on Facebook with a thank you message, and then a funny thing happened: two different friends said, "You're welcome."

Odd, right?

Neither one of them contradicted the other. Neither said, "You didn't buy that! I did!" This left a few options in my mind: maybe the one who bought it didn't feel like arguing, or maybe the two of them went in as a pair to buy it for me, or, unlikely but logical, neither one of them actually bought me that shirt. It's the only thing that makes sense to me, but I didn't want to force the issue, and just let it go.

Another running theme at work, especially for the last year, has been the use of dumpster fire memes. I have posted photos of dumpster fires on my Facebook page so many times in the past year that my friend Jocelyn bought me a dumpster fire Christmas ornament, and also I was asked to stop posting them in relationship to workplace issues. This wasn't a written rule or a reprimand, just a strongly worded suggestion.

A few weeks ago I was seething about something unrelated, as I sometimes do, and I started thinking about the unofficial, unwritten rules of our workplace, "No pictures of dumpster fires, Joel. Wear a tie every day, Joel.", and suddenly a lightbulb went on over my head: What if the two rules contradicted each other? If both rules were in the same place at the same time, what would happen? Would one trump the other? Would I have to take off the tie, or would I be allowed to present the dumpster fire to the world?

Determined to find out, I went online to Zazzle and designed and ordered my own dumpster fire tie, using some artwork I found online:



A funny thing happened the night that it came in the mail, though. I was super excited to wear it, and was going to Facebook to post about it, but when Facebook opened the first thing at the top of the page was a Facebook memory of one year ago: the Jewel Kiammer shirt photo. I looked at it, and immediately remembered how two friends took credit for sending me that, and thought, "Could that happen again?" I decided to perform a little experiment, and posted a note on Facebook that I'd received a lovely tie without a note, and did not know who sent it to me. I then texted several friends to ask, "Did you send me a tie?" Since they didn't send me a tie, they all answered, "No."

Except that one of them, my friend Meghan, said, "Yes."

I was immediately skeptical, because I bought this tie for myself, and asked Meghan what was on it. Meghan sidestepped the question by pointing out that part of showing my gratitude should include a Facebook post of my gift with a nice thank you note. I promised to post such a thing, but mentioned again that I did not believe she had sent me this particular gift. Meghan mentioned that my skepticism hurt, so I apologized, thanked her for my gift (which I bought for myself), and promised to tag her in the morning.

During the night, six other friends took credit for my tie. Some of them were clearly joking, but Meghan was holding firm to her story.

Prior to posting in the morning, I offered Meghan the chance to retract her statement, but she did not. I posted a lovely thank you note to Meghan, regarding the tie I purchased for myself. When we got to work, I told her again that I did not believe she had purchased this tie, and not only did she insist that she did, but she told other people in the office that she did. Meghan was all in on claiming to have purchased the tie that I purchased and lied about. I couldn't tell the truth without revealing my lie, but I still gave her repeated chances to retract hers.

Meghan stuck to her story, and I looked like a terribly ungrateful person who couldn't just take a nice gift and be happy.

Around noon I asked Meghan again if she wanted to confess, and texted her a screencap of the order confirmation email, claiming a friend had sent it to me. I carefully cropped it to remove the header that was addressed to me, the person who had placed the order. Meghan responded by claiming that it could be photoshopped, or someone could have logged in and gone through the entire process of ordering to take that photo without actually paying. I posted the cropped order confirmation to the Facebook thread, and Meghan continued to claim that she had ordered me the tie.

I again invited her to confess, and she again stuck to her story.

This left me in a difficult position. Should I go ahead and reveal that I ordered the tie myself, exposing Meghan as a fraud, or was I, as a friend, now obligated to support my friend by covering for her lie? I met some friends for dinner on Sunday and explained my dilemma, and they were unanimous in their answer:

"Dump her out, Joel."

So here I am, dumping out both Meghan and myself, but I did give her another chance on the way to lunch today to confess before I wrote this. She says that she meant it as a joke, but once she started she was just in too deep and couldn't figure out how to get out.

There's probably a moral in there somewhere.

Or this whole thing could just be a long, messy dumpster fire.

Open All the Doors and Let You Out Into the World

It's the happiest, saddest time of the year.

It's graduation season.

The past few weeks, as they always are at this time of year, have been a daily cycle of wrap up meetings, transition meetings, banquet dinners, farewell lunches, award ceremonies, hugs, photos, and any number of other events leading to one thing: graduation.

Lights out.

Closing time.

It's the time of year when we say goodbye.

I work with students, and I love working with students.

I work with amazing student leaders, who have a mission and a vision and a cause, and effortlessly talk others into following them.

I work with students who are going to change the world someday, and students who are already changing it now.

I work with students who are passionate about making our campus a better place, or our city, or our state, or our country, or our world.

I work with students who are amazingly talented, students who are poets and dancers and actors and singers and musicians, artists and builders and makers and world shapers.

I work with students who work for change, and with students who work to preserve and honor tradition.

I work with students who are raising children that I would sit next to in a restaurant.

I work with students who are geniuses, students whose minds move at faster paces and higher levels than I can easily imagine.

I work with students who fight prejudice and inequity, students who strive to live and breathe social justice and positive empowerment, students who want to bring us together and raise us all up higher.

I work with students who will become teachers, doctors, dentists, lawyers, politicians, accountants, chefs, mothers, fathers, writers, photographers, reporters, physicists, soldiers, ambassadors, and any other job you can think of.

I work with students who teach me new things every day, and I hope that somewhere, in some way, I've taught them something, too, and that it was something worth knowing.

I work with students, and then I wave from the doorway of my office as we turn them out into the world.

Then I clean up my desk, straighten my office, and wait for next year.

When I will work with students again.

I See Dead People... In The Lobby

We're still in 30 Days of Blogging, and since we already started talking about dead people yesterday I think we'll just continue, as I tell you the story of the ghost that I saw in the lobby in February.

That's right.

Now, turn off all the lights, pull your blankets tight around you, and settle in for the least frightening ghost story ever told!

Every year in the spring we have a process called Room Selection, where the current students get to pick their room for next year. Under our current model it lasts for two weeks, runs from 7 AM to 7 PM, and is all computerized. It's very convenient for the students, since they can just sit in their room and log in, but just in case they run into trouble someone has to be in the office to answer the phones the whole time, and that's usually my job. That means that for two weeks, I come in much earlier than usual so that my computer is all booted up and ready by 7 AM. It usually means that I'm the first one in the office for those two weeks, and, as I discovered this year, often the first one in the building in the morning. How do I know?

None of the lights were on when I got there.

See, between Room Selection last year and Room Selection this year our entire building was outfitted with a new, energy efficient lighting system in all of the hallways, classrooms, and offices. Everything is fitted with motion sensors, and if enough time goes by without anyone moving in front of one the lights shut off and don't turn on again until someone trips the sensor again. In the lobbies, offices, and classrooms it turns on the whole room at once, but in the hallway it only turns on about twenty feet at a time. It's actually kind of cool and feels oddly futuristic when you walk through the building and it turns on all around you, but I digress.

Our building is built on a hill, which means that last year when I parked out back my office was four floors away, but right above me. During Room Selection, I started parking in the lot on the side of the building, which had the advantage of putting my office only two floors above me but which meant I had to walk the entire length of the building to get to it. This wasn't terrible, as I fell into a routine of parking, walking through the third floor of the Communications Building (the other half of our building; it's technically all one building since the dividing line between the two is an actual physical line in the hallway on the floor), getting a copy of the student newspaper in the lobby, hopping on the lobby elevator to go up one floor, and then walking the rest of the way to my office.

One morning during Room Selection I started to follow my routine, and something a little odd happened.

As I approached the building from the side lot, I saw someone in the lobby, at the newspaper stand. You can see this from outside, because the whole front side of the third floor is glass, as you can see in this photo where I've circled the newspaper rack:



Now, you have to understand that the lights were not on at that point, and I could only see the newspaper rack because the lights outside were shining through the windows. I noticed a man bending over the rack, wearing a suit, and a red tie, which was hanging down as he bent, presumably grabbing a newspaper. My mind was focused on Room Selection, and I lost sight of him and the rack as I turned to enter the side door at the end of the building:



As I began to walk down the hallway, still thinking about Room Selection, I still couldn't see the newspaper rack, and the hallway lights began to turn on. One set turned on here:



one set turned on here, where I could just barely see the rack next to the welcome mats:



and another set turned on here:



Look carefully at the ceiling above the farthest bench in that last photo. See a long, skinny white thing with a block at the end by the windows? That's one of the motion sensors. That particular one turns on the last piece of hallway lighting, and then when I walked past it, the lights in the lobby snapped on:



And the lobby was empty.

Nobody at the elevator, and nobody at the newspaper racks.

So where did the man in the tie go?

The answer is, of course, NOWHERE.

The hallway past the lobby was still dark, so he could not have gone that way. The lobby was dark until I stepped into it, so he could not have crossed to the classrooms at the back of the lobby or gotten on the elevator. Also, the elevators in that side of the building chime when they stop at each floor, which I would have heard. He can't have gone out the front doors of the lobby and outside, either, for the same reason that he can't have gone to the back of the lobby: Look at the lobby picture again. The motion sensor for the lobby is directly above the lobby doors. You can't open them without triggering it, and turning the lights on. As a matter of fact, he can't ever have been at the newspaper rack at all, even though I saw him there through the window, because you can't approach the newspaper rack from any direction without setting off a motion sensor.

No one else on campus seems to have ever heard any ghost stories about the Communications Building. I was too far away to see what the man looked like, other than that he had a red tie and a dark suit, so I can't really describe him to someone. I didn't feel any kind of menace or threat, and didn't realize I'd seen something impossible until I was already at my desk and started thinking, "Hey, where's that guy GO, anyway? And how come he didn't turn any of the lights on?"

I walked back through that part of the building that night when I was leaving, so that I could take these photos and so that I could try to figure out if it was possible to get to and from the newspaper rack in the space of the twelve seconds it took me to walk down the hallway while also somehow avoiding the motion sensors on all sides.

It's not.

So, like any sane, rational adult, I immediately started parking out back again and have never again walked through that part of the building after dark.

I hope he enjoys his newspaper.

What I Did At Work Yesterday

I did a lot of things at work yesterday, but after spending a few hundred dollars yesterday morning on car repair, this was by far the most satisfying:



My job contains so many awesome moments on a regular basis.

Most and Least

A few weeks ago a student was asking me how I got from my degree to where I am now, and what career path brought me from entering college with the idea that I would be a high school English teacher to working in the UT Housing office. While we were discussing the somewhat meandering road I followed (which started with "All of my friends were applying for staff positions, so I figured I would, too..." because I was such a unique and independent thinker my freshman year) the student asked me a question that I thought I would file away for this month's 30 Days of Blogging:

"What do you like most and least about your job?"

Most: I like that I help people. Living arrangements can be stressful, and I like that I can help to relieve that stress a little bit so that our students can focus on more important things. Am I saving the world? No. I'm not curing cancer here, but I making life the slightest bit easier when I walk a student through the process for requesting a single room or I help put them together with their roommate. Does it mean that I can help every student that I work with? No, not directly. The most requested freshmen hall on campus only has 500 beds and we have 4300 freshmen, so everybody can't have what they want. However, I try to treat all students fairly, and I try to always offer an alternative solution, and I like to think that being treated with respect and having someone listen to your complaint even if they can't do anything to fix it helps in some way, too.

And it helps some people to hear the word "no" once or twice in their lives, so there's that, too.

Least: Sometimes I feel old.

In the fall semester I teach, and a couple years ago on the first day of class we were talking about what it means to be a college freshman, why you're here, what's different in college, what's the same, etc., and one of the students asked what it was like when I was a freshman. For just a second before answering I realized that the kids in my class were born during my freshman year of college. What was it like? It was like you weren't alive yet, kid in the front row. Most of the time working with college students energizes me, but every once in a while I just feel terribly disconnected and worlds away from them, and it makes me a little sad.

A colleague and I were discussing this in the fall, and I think she said it best when she said, "It feels that way because every fall when classes start we're a year older, but every fall the freshmen are always eighteen."

I love what I do, though, and I love where I work, so even though there are things that I like and dislike and days when I'm excited to go to work and days when I have no desire to get out of bed and drive to the office, I am overall happy.

And that's what a job should do for you.

Office Space

As Jeannie mentioned yesterday, we opened the residence halls for spring this weekend, which means that I was in the office all day on Saturday and Sunday. If opening is going well, then things are pretty quiet up at the office, and things today didn't pick up until lunchtime.

It's kind of eerie walking around our building with no students. On regular weekends, there's usually someone else around, but classes haven't started yet so most of the professors aren't back either, and I noticed that I had the hallways completely to myself when I got hungry this morning and went to the vending machine in the basement. Intrigued by the odd sense of isolation, I took out my camera and starting snapping random photos, just to see what I would end up with.



Have I mentioned that our building is curved? Because it is:



Based on these pictures it's also a little spooky in a way that I can't quite put my finger on.















Maybe it was just the odd and total silence, but even everyday things look strange to me in these pictures.



It's probably a sign that I need to get outside next weekend.

A Tale of Two Sun Eaters

I haven't updated in a few weeks, because I've been really busy at work, and have had to go in the last two weekends in a row as well as staying late a lot. Remember back in December and January when my coworkers and I had to fight the Sun Eater?



Ferro Lad? What are you doing here?

I mean, I'm glad you suddenly seem not to be dead anymore, but I was right in the middle of explaining how I've been spending the last couple of weeks fighting the Student Billing Statements Sun Eater, and



Well, you know, it's more of a metaphor, really.



Well, you know, it was kind of horrible anyway, even if it wasn't a real Sun Eater.







I... fell asleep early and missed one of my shows?



It's really nice of you to recognize that, and...

Hey, where are you going?



Ferro Lad?

Why I've been at work even though the university is closed this week

A few of my colleagues and I have gone into work every day this week, and will probably keep doing so all the way through the end of the weekend, even though the university is closed this week and we are on vacation. A number of my friends and other colleagues keep asking why, but the answer is a little difficult to explain.

It's not that I'm inarticulate or anything. I don't speak in grunts or tongues. The problem is that I love my job, and I enjoy doing it, but when I try to explain it to most people their eyes start glazing over and it seems kind of like I'm reading Babbitt out loud to them. All they hear is numbers and reports and spreadsheets and computer and charges and balances and credits and codes and blah blah blah and they've totally lost interest even though they're the one that asked what I was doing at work this week in the first place.

So people keep asking, and I keep trying to think of a way to explain, and running into a wall. I was trying to think up a short, entertaining explanation today beyond "Working on billing" when inspiration struck me: I saw a lady wearing a "WWJD?" sweatshirt at the store, and I thought, "What would Jesus do? Jesus would illustrate this with a parable. It would be about sheep and shepherds or something, and seem really simple, but really the sheep are the people and the shepherd is the Pope. Or the shepherd is Jesus. And the sheep are the Catholics. Something like that. But anyway, people would hear the story and understand!" I don't know anything about sheep, so I can't really form a good parable about them, but I do know superheroes, and I'm going to roll with that.

So, with that in mind, here's the story of why I'm at work this week, which I call "The Sun Eater is Made of Student Account Statements".

Anyway, once upon a time, there was a terrible menace called a Sun Eater, which ate suns:



For the purposes of our story, the Sun Eater represents improper student billing statements. It is a violent solar powered cloud of incorrect charges, double credits, and mangled financial aid caused by computer and human errors. When student accounts are correct, they are happy little stars, twinkling brightly in the university sky. When they are incorrect, the Sun Eater swallows them up, and disaster occurs.

Now, with the menace of the Sun Eater looming on the horizon, there are two computer systems on campus working to stop improper student billing statements. For the purposes of our story, we'll call them the Legion of Superheroes and the Fatal Five:



I'm not going to say which office is the Legion and which is the Fatal Five, because I don't want to imply that either our office or the Bursar's Office is evil. Instead, we'll just say that they're two completely different computer operating systems forced to work together to fight the Sun Eater, and the computer systems are getting along about as well as you'd expect:



Yeah.

And while the systems are busy not communicating well, the Sun Eater is amassing more and more errors, becoming a larger and larger problem. Different people from different offices keep trying to tackle the problem individually, but it's just too big, and they get smacked around like the Sun Eater smacking around Superboy with red sun rays:



Everyone has to work together, and a drastic solution is called for. In this case, Tharok, the cyborg leader of the Fatal Five, invents an absorbatron bomb which will detonate in the Sun Eater's core and destroy it forever. Our absorbatron bomb is that every student account with an active contract needs to be hand checked and hand corrected, and it needs to be done now. That means somebody has to make a sacrifice, and take one for the team, or the universe will die in a flood of angry phone calls from the Sun Eater's parents.

Enter Ferro Lad:



Ferro Lad knows that he has the best chance of success even if he has to sacrifice himself and his week off between semesters, so he swoops in and carries that absorbatron bomb into the heart of the Sun Eater:



And Ferro Lad saves the world through the power of sacrifice, dying according to the prophecy:



foretold by the Hag:



who turned out to be the White Witch:



who was the sister of Dream Girl:



and who was under a curse that could only be cured by having Dream Girl dress up as a robot:



so that she could trick an amnesiac Supergirl:



into tricking the Legion of Superpets into attacking the Legion of Substitute Heroes:



even though Supergirl only had temporary amnesia because Brainiac 5 made Shrinking Violet fly into her nostril:



and plant kryptonite in her brain:



because he loved her.

But that's a story for another day. The moral of our story is that sometimes, for the good of the universe (or just the university), someone (or several someones in multiple offices) has to make a sacrifice and carry that absorbatron bomb (or give up their week off) to defeat the Sun Eater (or correct student accounts) so that the Sun Eater's parents don't call the president's office, and it all works out for the best for everyone.

Except Ferro Lad, who died:



but Ferro Lad will just take a long weekend in January or February to make up for it.