kfitz

Monday Morning Condo Blogging, vol. 5

So now that I’m back in the land of connectivity —

— well, I have to qualify that. Not long ago, we moved office, and when we arrived in our newly-refurbished, fabulously modern and yet not characterless renovated building, there was a small hitch. You’ll best grasp this through a bit of illustration, I think. Here’s a lovely picture of my office, from the vantage point of my door:

A photo of a very nice academic office

And here’s a reverse shot, from the vantage point of my desk. You’ll notice something a bit odd at the extreme right of the image:

A photo taken from the desk of the same office

That odd little protrusion in the wall behind my filing cabinet is the phone/ethernet jack for my office. Which, as you may have gathered, is nowhere near my desk. I’ve spent the last three months with cables trailing across the office, which were only really an issue when I wanted to access the built-in shelves behind and to the left of my desk. As I was pretty convinced that I was one day going to trip and kill myself, and as I frankly just found the exposed wires ugly, I asked campus maintenance if they could do something about it.

Which they did.

I came in to the office one day week before last to discover that somebody had installed mouldings most of the way along my floorboards, intended to channel the cables “invisibly” along the wall:

An ethernet cable emerging from the wall and disappearing into a mouling

However, because of this, the tripping-problem actually became worse, as my ethernet cable was simply too short to make it all the way across the room along the edge of the wall. One call to my trusty tech-support folks, and —

Well, while I was gone, she apparently brought by a longer cable, but couldn’t figure out how to get it through the moulding. So campus maintenance came back, ran the new cable through the existing moulding, and then finished running the molding the rest of the way around the side of my desk.

There’s only one problem: I had the PowerBook with me at the conference, and so the maintenance guys couldn’t conceivably have known where on the desk I usually kept the computer–except that there was ONE BIG EMPTY SPACE on the desk, where a bunch of other unplugged cables were lingering. That might have been a clue. Nonetheless, the new, longer ethernet cable remains at least three feet too short to reach any actually working spot on my desk, unless, say, one were to pry open the moulding and pull the cable out through the edge of it, stretching it toward a reasonable plug-in spot:

a cable emerging from a mouling and stretching toward a desk

And that’s why I’m out of time to post any actual pictures of the condo-in-process (now with windows!) today.

That, and that I haven’t yet prepared for the class that I have to teach in ten minutes.

But more pictures, and windows, soon.

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