Mope

Mope

 Yesterday was pretty much a loss in terms of work, because I took a half-day and then spent a bit too much OF said half-day…

…researching refrigerators. 

Ours is dying slowly, which means everything in the freezer is still frozen but everything in the fridge is… just not quite cold enough.  We’ve loaded it up with ice packs from the chest freezer (hey! a plus to getting all those ice packs – my MS drugs come packed in ice in foam coolers, every 3 months ) so we’re not in immediate danger of losing anything, but it’s time for a new fridge. 

I’ve even picked one out!  Now I just have to make the Lowes system let me buy it. 

Warning, after this, this post gets into the pandemic stuff and gets a little depressed. 

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Skillz

 It seems my most useful skill at work currently is my ability to work from home and my practice dealing with my boss remotely.  

Well, possibly not the most useful; but with a desk set-up and my own office space, I seem to be doing better than a number of my co-workers.  

Kunama asked about skills I use in work, and I’m going to talk first about one I don’t get enough use out of right now – Excel. 

I am pretty darn good at excel, but those skills are sadly not needed nearly as much at this job as they were at the last (Trade-offs.  This job is not driving me insane. You know, plusses and minuses.) One year at my old job, my boss gave me an unwitting birthday present of creating a spreadsheet that literally took me the whole day to make. It was great. 

My wordcount spreadsheet is more complicated than anything I have to make in this job. 

/melodramatic woe

On the other hand: copyediting!  I am seriously listed as copyeditor on a formal journal and that is a reasonably large portion of my job (not enough, the editors move slow and the reviewers move slower).  I am learning LaTeX (slowly) and learning enough statistics to be able to tell if something is a typo or just Written in Stats. I regularly copyedit my boss’s proposals, fancy emails, and the like as well. 

Lately, it seems my most useful skill at work comes from LARPing. 

Specifically, Vampire LARP, playing politics with handfuls of other nerds pretending to be centuries-old vampires. 

There’s a lot of learning how to say what you’re saying without saying it going on in that sort of politicking environment, and there’s a lot of learning to listen to what people aren’t saying in response. 

(It leaked into Fae Apoc more than a little, which is unsurprising considering I was fresh from 10+ years of actively playing the game when I created Fae Apoc.)

The Dean talks. The Vice-President of the Uni talks. The President of the Uni sends e-mails. The Associate Deans talk. 

And I listen between the lines a lot. 

(I think I like the copyediting more.)

How are you doing with your job skills? How are they translating to the current situation?

Inspiration

Sitting through faculty meetings on Zoom, where I don’t have to watch what my face is doing and most of the time they’re not aware I’m there — it’s very, ah, educational. 

Riffing off of something Kunama asked, I’m thinking about ways my jobs make their way into my writing. 

The first thing that comes to mind is the library at Wells College, where I worked for a blessed, awesome, 9 months.  Well, I worked in the Book Arts Center, but half of some of my days were spent doing very little in the library while working for another associate Dean. 

The architect of that place was allergic to right angles and to floors that lined up and, like a split-level that we once tried to rent, it just kept going and going, up, up, up.  You never really knew where you were, but you were definitely somewhere, probably. 

That library had made its way into more than a few stories. 

https://www.wells.edu/library

So’ve the facilities staff at my current university job, who are basically elves.  They are startled when you see them, they do magic when your back is turned — especially the groundskeepers. 

Watching them trim the ivy to exactly the right amount is both amazing and amusing. 

And, while the faculty at the unnamed university in my The Trouble With Chickens stories are, ah, well, they’re a little more bloodthirsty than those at the university of my job, there’s definitely a bit of leakage there. 

Actually, in general, you’ll find that there’s a lot of academia in my writing when I’m working in academia.  It’s more of a trope than when, say, I was an admin for a software company. 

(After these faculty meetings, the professors at several fictional universities might be getting a bit darker…)

Oh! Oh, a story I never finished and only posted one bit of — but some maps, I posted some maps! — Portal Bound, https://www.patreon.com/posts/portal-bound-17977388 — this was inspired both by my experiences working in libraries (First at the SUNY I did my first 2 years of college at, then the Rundel Library/Central LIbrary of Rochester & Monroe County  in, ah, Rochester (NY), https://roccitylibrary.org/location/central/, then the aforementioned Wells LIbrary) and by the architecture of the university I work at now. 

I think I’ve taken the question and run sideways and backwards with it, but hey, I got a post that isn’t about my pajama pants!

Does your work or previous workplaces show up in your art? In your hobbies?

(Like me, have you found yourself staring at a building wondering “how do I do that in Minecraft?”?)