a home away from home
Sometimes, I get struck by a fact that I know well, but which hits me nonetheless. I’ve been at the same building, in the same office, at work since the summer of 2000. That’s a long time to have the same office. And it’s just the second office I’ve been in, the first being a few doors down the same hall where I spent my first five years.
The world has changed a lot since the summer of 2000, and I’ve changed a lot since then as well, but I don’t want to reflect too much on that. Rather, I’d like to focus on the room that is my office.
When I first got to Southampton, it was the office of a senior member of staff, someone on the cusp of retirement, and he helped me a lot that first year, fitting into a university system different than the one I grew up in, as a student and a post-doc. He retired and someone else too the office, and then he retired and I got promoted, and it became my work-home, as it still is.
The furniture has changed a lot. The desk isn’t the desk I had when I first took the office. When I first moved in, in the (he laughs) old days, I had a lot of filing cabinets, 22 drawers spread between 2- and 4-drawer cabinets, mainly holding reprints and preprints of math papers that I’d collected over time. One day, though, I realized that the green of the folders in the drawers had colored not only the first page, but sometimes the second or third page, and I had a clear out.
Some of the papers I’d collected because they’d looked interesting, and perhaps they were. Some I’ll admit had been filed away, unread, and never to be read, by me. So I went from 22 drawers to 2, keeping only a small handful of papers.
The habit of collecting papers that look interesting has never left me, though, though now it’s electronic versions, PDF is my friend, and one project that eternally looms is clearing out the folder where I put the papers that look like they might be interesting, or useful. Oh the things to do.
But something happened recently that caused some sadness. The blackboard that had been there since the mid-1960s when the building was built, was removed over the summer. Fortunately, I didn’t have sketched on it the core of a theorem that would reshape the world, tempting as it might be to say so. It was replaced by a white board, functionally equivalent but somehow with less heart than the familiar smoothness of the blackboard. And I’d just bought fancy new chalk.
But times change. Blackboards give way to whiteboards, and whiteboards may yet give way to some electronic version, though I may resist that to the extent I can. The familiar desk phones get collected, which to be fair happened at home as well. And the world abides.
One thing I did enjoy, though, is that over the past ten years or so, people had drawn pictures of cats at one end of my old blackboard. I made sure to protect them over time, never erasing, and I do have a picture that I took earlier this past summer, I’m not sure why. A reminder perhaps, but perhaps I’ll see if I start a new collection of drawings, marking times slow passage.
multijimbo 