life, apparently

Strange Physics Grad Student (SPGS) visited our office last year and said he decided to quit Physics and join our dept. Now this is more than strange. He’s been a SPGS for about 4 years and our dept. is nowhere near Physics. Nowhere. I was trying to think of a suitable metaphor but they are just so far apart. Maybe it is like a car mechanic decided one day that he wanted to become a gardener because flowers are pretty and the car mechanic industry is pretty full. My first reaction was this guy is a Whack-O and I forgot about him. But, he MOVED IN TO MY OFFICE! What, you ask? Well, this is a bit of a side bar but my postdoc advisor left and one of the other postdocs left with him and the other got a new postdoc at a different university. So there are two free seats in my office. SPGS decided he’d like to be up here with us gardeners rather than with the car mechanics. So he moved in.

Then the office flooded. “Are you sure you would rather stay in this disaster area rather than with the car mechanics?”, I asked. Oh yes SPGS replied.

We temporarily moved while they repaired our office. We moved back in while I was out of town (someone nicely arranged for my stuff to be moved back as well, which I very much appreciate). When I arrived, I noticed that now SPGS was taking up 2 desks! He moves in and they spreads like wildfire. Now the thing is I don’t care about either of those desks and I definitely would never have used them myself so there is no reason for me to care. BUT it just gets on my nerves. Then, the straw that broke the camel’s (gardener’s?) back: he stole my power strip. See, only one of those desks had a power strip before and since he expanded his office space, he needed another. There are, I was told, about a million new power strips with the office supplies. That is not the point people, aren’t you paying attention -- you can’t just steal half of my office and my power strip.

So I just unplugged all his stuff and rightfully reclaimed my power strip. When SPGS came in that day he said, oh my computer isn’t working and I said that’s because I took back my power strip and kept working. At least I told him what the problem was - I could have let him flail around twiddling cords for a good 10 minutes, but I didn’t. See, I’m nice like that.