When it rains, it pours

And I'm not even talking about the rains that we're subjected to in this parts of the country for the last few days. Now was it two or three? I forget. My memory is degrading faster than my weight, but I'll get to that later.

So this is going to be a rant against my working conditions. And if you're allergic to rants, then I suggest you stop reading right now, I am not longer responsible for you dying of a brain hemorrhage. You've been warned.

To provide you with some background. I am a postdoc at a university in a department which shall be unnamed. Now the life of a postdoc isn't any better than the life of a PhD student. You get the same dingy cubicle, a desk, a very uncomfortable chair, and piles and piles of old printouts mysteriously end up cluttering your desk no matter how hard you try to keep it clean. And if you're lucky, the heating/cooling system will actually maintain a comfortable atmosphere in your cubicle. However, that almost never happens. What happens instead is that the vent directly above you blows hot air in summer and cold air in winter. They don't trust you with the thermostat settings because you don't have the requisite number of brain cells to set temperature on a thermostat. You're, however, expected to research on how helicopters fly. Now these cubicles often a dozen to room with the roominess of a VW bug, are often guarded by a strong door with graduate students often having electronic card access, or if you're really unlucky still managed by keys which you can get only after a three-month wait period... during which period you're at the mercy of your peers.

In my particular case, we're in the postdoc office. While dingier and more ancient looking than the graduate students' office, it does provide a sub-office (numbered XXXX-A, XXXX-B and so on) for each postdoc. There is, however, a catch. Isn't there always a catch. No one has keys to these sub-office doors. Everyone leaves their sub-office doors open and just hopes that the main door (numbered XXXX in our example) is secure enough to keep nosey types at bay. Things went on fine where everyone just left the door alone until this Monday. I show up at work and I find the door to my office locked and I'm without a key. I go up to the department office and apparently they don't have the master key either. So I was asked to track down a senior professor who happened to have the master key, so that I could gain access to my own office.

To make sure that this doesn't happen again, I diligently used duct tape to prevent the locks from locking and hoped that this would sort the problem. So imagine my surprise when I walk in today and find the duct tape removed and the door locked again. This time the senior professor was nowhere to be found. The people at the department office washed their hands off of any responsibility and refused to help me. So after a good two hours of running around I was able to find a person who was able to open my room.

Once I gain access to my office, I'm craving a cup of coffee. So I start brewing coffee, and as fate would have it, my coffee machine decides to have an abortion. The coffee grounds block the small opening that drips the coffee down into the cup and the water from the reservoir overflows in the filter and makes a mess of my desk. I manage to clean my desk, my coffee machine and salvage about a quarter cup of coffee from that ordeal.

I guess this is nature's way of saying, "you should've stayed home and not bothered to show up to work".