Looking Out the Window. Or Not.

At work next year, I will have a new office. Apparently it comes with this "coordinator" position in gender studies, despite the fact that the job isn't that much. The new office is in that sorta-new building, which was where I had most of my classes this past spring. Naturally, now that my office is in that building, all of my classes have been assigned rooms closer to my old office. At least I'll get out of the building from time to time. I can alternate off-gassing with asbestos!

In my old office, I had windows. Two rows of them, as a matter of fact. One row was way up high, twenty feet above my head. I could see if the sky was blue or gray. The other row was directly over my desk. In some weird idea of some half-high architect way back in the 1970s, this bank of windows was supposed to overlook a classroom. In the other two buildings like this one, they do. It isn't pleasant for anyone because the person in the office can hear the classroom below and the people in the classroom can hear the phones ringing in the offices above.

My building was not used for classrooms anymore. They had lowered the ceilings in the spaces that used to be classrooms and closed off the space between the classroom and my window. I had a view of a crawlspace.

My office was also triangular, with one of the triangle points squared off with the door and only the door. I found that charming, if a bit crowded.

Now I will be in a slightly larger, square office with nice, new furniture and that "new car" smell. They gave me more file cabinets, a slightly larger bookshelf (why do they think academics only need ONE bookshelf?), and more desk space that is conveniently arranged in a U. The whole set up makes me a little embarrassed at my good fortune.*

I even have a window. Floor to ceiling in size, and looking outside where I can see trees and grass and what passes for nature. Although, again, I wonder what structural anomaly required this configuration or what drugs the architect was huffing. Here is a picture of the window:

The wall on your right is the wall on which the window is located. The wall on the left runs perpendicular to the window. The edge of the window on the right is, in fact, the edge of the window. The edge of the window on the left is not.

To repeat: The left wall runs perpendicular to the window, but the left edge of the window is not the edge. Let's take a closer look, shall we?:

The window goes past the width of the room, so they created a tiny little sliver of a nook to accommodate this.

I haven't had a chance to get a good look in the office on the other side of that wall, but from what I can tell, she doesn't have a weird bump or outcrop in her wall. The wall between our offices is just that much thicker. Is there some sort of load-bearing I-beam in there? Or perhaps the air system (although our vents are in the ceiling)? I have no idea, but it seems they absolutely could not move that wall over by 2 feet in order to put this window fully into this office.

In any case, it is a nice office, and I have space in which to meet with students and enough wall space on which to hang my diplomas. I've always wanted to hang my diplomas on my office wall. I hope it will inspire the students with shock and awe!

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*There are one or two drawbacks, but I shouldn't talk about them as much as I am dying to talk about them. I have found that I actually have some limits on what I will write here.