Month: July 2011

The weather was gorgeous today, if a little on the warm side. It’s supposed to be even warmer tomorrow, which isn’t exactly a tragedy, but it means we’re likely to “enjoy” another round of AC load shedding at work. When that happens, we open the door between the two towers and use fans to circulate cool air from the West tower into our area in the East tower. Even with stealing cooler air from other areas, it gets hot and humid in my department. And a new wrinkle is that something–a mouse, maybe?–has apparently died in the ceiling outside the door between the two towers. If we have to open that door tomorrow, it will be hot and stinky.

The horrible smell has been reported to building management, but these are the same folks who put trash bags over leaky sinks in lieu of fixing them, so I’m not holding out much hope. I fully expect to come in to work one day to find the ceiling of the West tower draped with black plastic, which of course will do exactly NOTHING to get rid of the dead animal smell.

We can blame all of this on state budget cuts, which is an especially infuriating subject right now. Us worker bees–at least the lucky ones–got a whopping 1.5% pay raise this year. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing, especially considering that salaries have been frozen for awhile. We’ve been told to prepare for RIFs, which could begin in early fall, so I wasn’t expecting any raise.

And then I saw in the local paper today that the president of the university was given a 21.8% salary increase. We’re preparing to lay off people, we haven’t been able to hire anyone in my department in the last 2-3 years despite losing several through retirement, facilities budgets have been slashed (hence the AC outages), and we’re constantly being asked to do more with less, in ways that directly impact people like me. Not only is it ONLY the worker bees who are expected to sacrifice, but then we find out that the Big Giant Head is getting a huge reward? That’s demoralizing.

So, because of budget cuts at the state level (thanks Mitch Daniels, you smug, smarmy asshole!), we’re likely to roast tomorrow and we’re going to have to smell some kind of stinky dead animal while doing so. Just kill me now!