Staff with Forks (and Vacuum Cleaners) or: Some Like It Hot

When I arrived at UC Irvine in 2004 as a Step VI full professor (supposedly a rank of "great distinction"), the desk in my office was old and falling apart, on wobbly legs and with drawers that didn't close. It was rickety enough that I worried about it falling over and crushing me. Its one charm were the cute stickers that some very young child must have stuck there years ago. It was not the sort of desk you put in the office of a new faculty member you'd like to keep.

The rest of the furniture was similar. While nothing matched in the usual sense, at least it matched in the sense that it was all run down and a bit insulting. It reminded me of my Cinderella-like experience at IAS and my window-less office at Ohio State. Wasn't I too senior for this?

The department manager wanted me to use my start-up funds to buy new furniture. I pointed out that my start-up funds were explicitly earmarked for research purposes, and furniture didn't seem like research. (When I later asked the Dean about it, he was shocked that anyone would ask me to use for basic necessities, such as a desk, the research funds he had given me.)

During my first few weekends at UCI, I shuttled boxes containing 20 years' worth of papers and books from my home to my office. To ferry the boxes from my car to my office I used one of the department's utility carts that the staff had lent me.

There was a sharp knock on my office door. I thought, "How nice! Some colleague heard me, and wants to welcome me to the department!" I opened the door to indeed find a colleague I had never met, but it was an angry one. He claimed that he had reserved a cart, and he was angry that I had it. (If I had been on the ball, I would have borrowed Maria von Trapp's line from "The Sound of Music" and thanked him for how kind and thoughtful he was to make my first moments, as a stranger in a new job, so warm and pleasant.) Since he turned out to be heat-loving, I'll call him Iguana.

On some particularly hot days, I noticed that the temperature in my office was hotter than was bearable. The windows didn't open, it felt as if there was no ventilation, and it was over 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Some days I had headaches and felt dizzy, and once I realized that I had no recollection of the previous 15 minutes.

It turned out that Iguana's office housed the thermostat that controlled the temperature in my office, and he liked it hot. Facilities sent someone over, but Iguana refused to let them turn down the temperature. The department staff were afraid to talk to Iguana about it and told me to work it out with him.

Iguana and I eventually negotiated a reasonable settlement ... until he left for the summer without telling me, with the thermostat set way up high.

During my first three years at UCI, I occasionally reminded the department manager that when I was hired I had made clear how important my office environment was, the Chair and Dean had agreed to keep me happy in that regard, my offer letter made promises that weren't being kept, and three years is a long time to wait for a filing cabinet.

I made enough of a fuss that she eventually offered me the furniture of someone who had left, and the vacated faculty office of the new department Chair. I was eager to move to an office whose temperature wasn't controlled by Iguana.

Since I have a serious dust allergy, the staff assured me that my new office would be cleaned before I moved in. But on move-in date, large dust balls roamed the floor. When I pointed out the dust balls to the department manager, she sent another staff member to fetch one of the department's vacuum cleaners.

I was expected to do the vacuuming, while the two of them watched. Vacuuming wasn't in my job description. I suppose it wasn't in theirs, either. While I suspected that they would have willingly vacuumed for my male colleagues (this was the department manager who had said "Alice, Professor X is here" about a professor of lower rank), I thought it prudent to be agreeable and cooperative.

When I turned on the vacuum cleaner it immediately dumped a load of dirt in the middle of the office floor, spraying a cloud of dust in my face. After the dust had settled, and the vacuum cleaner adamantly and repeatedly refused to vacuum up the mess it had created, I interrupted their chat to point out that the vacuum cleaner was broken. I eventually managed to convince the skeptical department manager that there was no hope that this vacuum cleaner would pull through any time soon. She sent her staff friend to bring a different vacuum cleaner, and I vacuumed up the new dirt mound while they looked on.

I was reminded of the vacuuming, and of my Collecting Plates story, at a department party not so long ago, when I noticed students and faculty shoveling food into their mouths with their fingers because the forks had run out. 

The staff, who were running the event, were standing together chatting, near a bag of plastic forks. Trying to be helpful, I pointed out that there were no longer any forks on the food table.

The department manager (a more recent manager than the one who had watched me vacuum), who was standing closer to the food table than I was, grabbed a handful of forks. Rather than placing them on the nearby food table, she walked over to hand them to me.

Instinctively, I reached out to take them, but then I pulled back. I was pretty sure she wouldn't have tried to hand the batch of forks to any of the male faculty (not to mention that providing forks really was in her job description, and not in mine). While I wanted to be helpful, I didn't want to set a bad precedent in front of the students, faculty, and staff for how to treat female mathematicians.