Rule Followers

When I moved to Orange County, California in 2004, I had a serious case of culture shock. The OC didn't seem to have the same understanding of community that I know from every place else I've lived. I asked a local what I needed to know to understand the people. She replied, "They're self-absorbed." That was helpful, but it wasn't the full story.

One day I was working at a picnic table on a bluff overlooking a particularly lovely beach. Two women arrived with their large dogs, and sat at my table, continuing their very loud conversation.

I looked around. There were three or four other tables, and they were all empty. They were all pretty much the same, except that my table was a few feet closer to the ocean.

I already knew about this OC habit of sitting too close. I choose an isolated spot on an empty beach, and a couple sits down near me with their boombox blaring. My East Coast sensibilities lead me to think it's both more polite and more sensible to sit far from the only other person on the beach. Why don't they? My guess is that they're too lazy to walk a little further to a spot that's just as good but more private. Sometimes, at a nice overlook, the goal is to chase me away so they can have the view to themselves. I wondered whether that was the case for the two women at "my" picnic table.

I could have moved to a different table, but I didn't think it fair that I should be the one to move. 

Their conversation struck me as particularly inane and annoying. I fumed for awhile. Then I remembered the adage "be curious, not furious," and decided to be curious about why they chose to sit so close.

I struck up a conversation with them. Startled, they responded civilly. I asked whether they were from around here. Yes, they were from Newport Beach. Eventually I said, "I grew up on the East Coast, and I've been having a hard time understanding the behavior of people in Orange County. What could you tell me that might help?"

They thought for a moment, then one of them, who had spent some summers on the East Coast as a child, said "The difference between the East Coast and here is that people on the East Coast are rule followers." She made it clear that being a rule follower wasn't a good thing. According to her, people from Newport Beach considered themselves to be free and independent spirits who weren't constrained by something so banal as rules. Stop signs? Turn signals? Not for us.

They don't follow the rules that help people coexist peacefully in a civilized society. This was a revelation for me. It really has helped me understand people from Newport Beach (and why I find some of them so difficult to like). I was glad I asked.

A colleague once told me disdainfully about the only woman to have been Chancellor at our university. He thought she was a terrible Chancellor. I asked why. He said, "she's a rule follower." I've often heard people sneer at women as being sticklers for the rules. But if women in academia are more likely than men to be rule followers, perhaps it's because they're more likely to be punished if they break the rules.

I've spent a lot of time in academia in the proverbial "smoke-filled rooms" where decisions are made. What did I learn there? The in-crowd benefits from breaking the rules, and everyone else gets punished if we either break the rules, or break the unspoken rules we didn't even know existed. These Newport Beach women belonged to an "in" group that makes the rules, knows which rules can be broken, and decides who gets punished.

Some of the committees I served on made important career decisions about people. When my service on one such committee ended, I thought back on the experience. 

I remembered that some of the people we evaluated broke the rules and got away with it. Some of their transgressions seemed serious, like changing dates on documents, or claiming full credit for work that was joint with others. Virtually none of the transgressors were female.

Some other cases were memorable for other reasons. Colleagues of the person being evaluated had visceral anger toward the candidate, and had the attitude "what's she trying to get away with?" Their accusations didn't come with proof or evidence, and there was no way for my committee to corroborate the allegations. The people under attack had pushed someone's buttons, but it wasn't clear to me that they had actually done anything that was wrong or that was a valid reason for the committee to issue a negative decision.

Who were the people who caused these strong gut reactions? They were disproportionately women, blacks, and Jews. Whether they were unempathetically viewed as the "other", or had violated unspoken rules that they didn't know, they weren't part of the in-crowd. In any particular case, any prejudice was subtle enough that it would have been deniable.

As my conversation with the Newport Beach women was winding down, I said I was curious as to why they chose this table, rather than an empty one. They beat about the bush for a bit, then admitted that it was because this was the best table (by epsilon). "Were you hoping I would leave?" I asked. "Yes," they replied.

The Little Blue Button

The cryptic October 19, 2012 email began by announcing that "Beginning Saturday, October 20, 2012, Facilities Management will be implementing a new Office Air Handler Unit (AHU) shutdown schedule." 

The memo seemed to say that to reduce energy costs, the air would be turned off all day on weekends, and between 6 pm and 6 am on weekdays, in the wings that house the math and chemistry departments and part of the physics department.

My office is in one of those wings.

The email said "the override buttons will enable you to turn the air handler unit ON for a two (2) hour occupancy" and that each office thermostat has an override button "indicated by a Sun/Moon symbol." 

However, most of the offices in the wings don't have thermostats (their temperature is controlled by some nearby colleague's thermostat). 

When the wings were built in 2008, I chose my office partly because the floor plan showed a thermostat. But my thermostat turned out to be in a locked box, and I'm not allowed to have a key to the box. When my whiteboard was installed, someone had to go to a lot of trouble to cut holes in it for the locked thermostat box and for the motion sensor that controls the lights. It seemed slightly cruel to be told that there is an override button in my locked box.

I replied to the email:

"Thanks very much for your message. I have a thermostat in my office, but it is in a locked plastic box. Could you please remove the box, so that I can access the thermostat? (This will also make it easier for me to use my whiteboard, since the thermostat is recessed in my whiteboard.) Thanks very much."

I sent a follow-up reminding them of my office number and saying I looked forward to hearing from them about plans to unlock my thermostat. I never got a reply.

"For those who do not have a thermostat, please use the BLUE override button located on the hallway wall near the suite entry", continued the original email notification. "This new schedule will allow you to work in your office 24/7 with full control at the thermostat or blue button, rather than a schedule where the AHU turns off with no option to turn it back on."

I managed to find a little blue button on a wall at the far end of the hallway in my wing. Should I keep pressing it until the light goes on and stays on? Or goes off and stays off? The message didn't say, and I never remember which. If someone else already pressed it within the past two hours then it's already in the "on" mode. So I hold it for 20 seconds no matter what. (A colleague recently told me that the button's timing is erratic---it can take 25 seconds or more for it to light up.)

Some of my colleagues have told me that if they forget to press the button, or they forget to press it again after two hours, they eventually feel faint.

While the piece of paper above the button says "Hold Button For 5 Seconds", it doesn't say WHY to hold it. New students and faculty aren't told about the little blue button or its raison d'être, except for two cryptic "reminder" emails in November of 2014 and 2015.

Over the years, I've pointed out that informing new occupants of the wings about the existence and purpose of the little blue button is a health and safety issue. When I mentioned it at a meeting with staff from Environmental Health & Safety during the infamous Rowland Hall asbestos battle of 2018 (a story for the future), we were assured that annual reminders would be sent out from then on. It's more than three years later, and I haven't seen a reminder.