Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — July 25, 2004

I have a new office—a very nice new office—with
which I am extremely, even excessively and unreasonably, pleased. A few days ago
I was writing to someone about an entirely unrelated matter and
found myself beginning to babble about my new office. In
describing it to people, I’ve found myself about to use the
description that “I feel like I’ve died and gone to
heaven,” but I stop myself, because I do hope that no
matter how nice my new office is, it really isn’t in the
same league as heaven. And I hope and expect that heaven will not
include the maintenance of computer systems (although I
won’t be surprised if purgatory does). Still, the
expression is apt in a couple of ways.

I work for a small liberal arts
college. I’m in charge of administrative
information services, which means that I’m responsible for
the systems that manage the “back office” functions
of the college—the very mundane stuff such as student
records and financial systems which are necessary for, but a step
removed from, the real work of the college, which of course is
education. As anyone who has ever worked in higher education
knows, the administrative side of the school is generally apart
from and often perceived as being in opposition to the rest of
the institution: we are, after all, only overhead, a cost of
doing business, and there is frequently a degree of resentment on
the part of the faculty about the resources we consume: like
“powerful” to “House Ways and Means
Committee” or “shadowy” to “Opus
Dei”, the word “overpaid” often seems
permanently attached to the word “administrator.”
Those of us on this side of the house tend to operate in our own
world. Just to name one difference, the traditional academic
routine of long breaks and a summer lull is not for us—we
work right through them, and only notice academic events that
involve us, such as student registration.

The other half of information technology here, as at
most colleges, was called until recently Academic Computing and
deals with computing as it applies to education: student labs,
technology in the curriculum and in the classroom, and the like.
My school decided several years ago to build a new library.
Early in the planning for the building, the decision was made
that all information technology services would be housed there,
mainly in order to bring library services and academic technology
services closer together, as they had been overlapping considerably for some
time. My department was included in this plan more or less as a
tag-along: plans for the new building included a lot of computing
infrastructure that we would share, and so it just made sense for
us to have office space there.

Concomitant with the planning for and construction of the new
library, my department was busy with the implementation of an
entirely new administrative software system. This has been a huge
project and we have not paid attention to much else. We had been
informed that we would be moving to the new library, but beyond
going to an occasional meeting to discuss some specific details
of our office space and of the system room, the library project
proceeded without us. We knew it was in progress but gave it very
little thought until the time for us to move in became
imminent.

To communicate the shock we felt at the sight of the
nearly-finished facilities really requires some before-and-after
pictures, which I don’t have. It’s not that the new
office is luxurious. It would certainly not set any hearts on
fire in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. But it is large and
open and pristine, and it has a huge desk, guest seating, and a
great deal of storage. I have a weakness for desks: give me a
goodly expanse of open desk, a blank legal pad, and a pen, and I
feel capable of great work.

The old office was, by comparison, a slum. And here is where
we get into the theology of the thing. While it is true that the
old office was in an old building which is in great need of
renovation, its worst aspects—the really slummy
aspects—were my doing. My office was one of several rooms
that housed three people and a lot of hardware. It had become a
warren of equipment, much of it broken or obsolete, and boxes of
forms we no longer use. In part because it was so full of junk,
and in part because of scheduling problems resulting from the
whole little complex having its own keys and alarm codes, the
housekeeping staff more or less abandoned us to our own devices
years ago, except for emptying the trash. Consequently the whole
area had become pretty grungy.

My office in particular was disheartening to say the least,
and often elicited clearly heartfelt sympathy from visitors
seeing it for the first time. Roughly one third
of it was occupied by useless equipment which I, due to some mild
neurosis, could not bring myself to discard: for example, a cabinet
maybe three or four cubic feet in size containing two mighty 650
megabyte disk drives, which had housed a significant chunk of the
college’s administrative database in 1991 or so. (If these
numbers mean nothing to you, consider the fact that the laptop
computer on which I am writing these words has about forty times
that amount of storage.) Half the space was occupied by an
enormous desk which was mostly covered in stacks of loose paper
and trade magazines which I felt that I should look at but never
did, and therefore did not discard. There was no place for a
guest to sit (and I admit that as a typically introverted
computer geek I did not consider this a problem,
but rather the contrary). Ten years of spilling things while
eating lunch at my desk combined with the fact that the room was
only vacuumed every few months had left the cheap carpet, which
was not merely not stain-repellent but positively
stain-receptive, fairly nasty.

I am, in short, a grievous sinner given the unmerited grace of
a fresh start. It wasn’t until I saw the nearly-completed
building that I finally paid attention and realized just how much
work and planning had gone into the project. Aside from the
obvious monumental labors of the workers who did the actual
construction, my colleagues in Academic Computing and Library
Services had spent many long hours in meetings that were either
difficult and contentious or deadly boring to make the thousands
of decisions required.

And I had to do almost nothing except walk in and take
possession. I am, to be sure, repentant, and will try very hard
not to make a slum of my new office. But the grace came
first, and I am grateful.</p