![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Feb. 8th, 2012 08:53 pm
Draußen ein Vogel sagt: es ist Frühling.
This is a line from a poem by Karl Kraus and it's written on a piece of blue paper in the shape of a bird that's affixed to the wall of our temporary office which the previous occupants christened "The Vault" due to its lack of windows. Technically, there is one: a room-height strip of opaque glass the width of a beer can that does at least allow us to tell whether it is day or night outside.
It's not really spring, of course, but once again the early bulbs have been fooled into thinking so. Snowdrops and daffodils are sprouting on campus and it makes my heart sink to see them. The days have been consistently above freezing for a couple weeks, but none of us experienced Midwesterners can shake the feeling that this is some cruel trick and nastier whether is still on its way. A year and a week to the day we had three feet of snow dumped on us and that's not something one forgets even in a winterless year like this one.
At least the move seems to have gone off without any nasty surprises. I had reckoned with a lost day today but by afternoon everyone was settling down to their usual work. By quitting time, we were even able to print and had hope that the shared routers' inability to support two stable connexions to our ILS software could be easily remedied. We'd forgotten about the lack of drawers in the improvised furniture so I returned to clean out an archaic filing cabinet, which meant almost an hour of removing binder clips from obsolete documentation. (Some hapless member of the cleaning crew is doubtless cursing my memory about now.)
Discarding old paperwork always makes me slightly sad, even--as in this case--when I personally had nothing to do with producing it, since I have generated quite a bit in my time and I know how many discussions and revisions go into even the most humble bits of documentation. Literally thousands of hours of effort are now sitting in a recycling bin right now waiting to be pulped. (I wasn't the only member of staff binging on purging today or yesterday.)
It's not really spring, of course, but once again the early bulbs have been fooled into thinking so. Snowdrops and daffodils are sprouting on campus and it makes my heart sink to see them. The days have been consistently above freezing for a couple weeks, but none of us experienced Midwesterners can shake the feeling that this is some cruel trick and nastier whether is still on its way. A year and a week to the day we had three feet of snow dumped on us and that's not something one forgets even in a winterless year like this one.
At least the move seems to have gone off without any nasty surprises. I had reckoned with a lost day today but by afternoon everyone was settling down to their usual work. By quitting time, we were even able to print and had hope that the shared routers' inability to support two stable connexions to our ILS software could be easily remedied. We'd forgotten about the lack of drawers in the improvised furniture so I returned to clean out an archaic filing cabinet, which meant almost an hour of removing binder clips from obsolete documentation. (Some hapless member of the cleaning crew is doubtless cursing my memory about now.)
Discarding old paperwork always makes me slightly sad, even--as in this case--when I personally had nothing to do with producing it, since I have generated quite a bit in my time and I know how many discussions and revisions go into even the most humble bits of documentation. Literally thousands of hours of effort are now sitting in a recycling bin right now waiting to be pulped. (I wasn't the only member of staff binging on purging today or yesterday.)