Winding Down

Well here we are at the end of another semester at Sac State. It's Thursday of finals week, but as all of the juries have already concluded it's already resembling a ghost town around here. All of the music majors have fled the building in search of greener pastures for the summer. I'm not sure how so many years have gone by, seemingly in the blink of an eye. This is the ned of my 18th year on staff here, and 24th overall counting my undergrad years. Next year will be the 25th year I've been on campus. Really? A quarter of a century? It boggles the mind.

I remember when I first started here - as a business major initially - in the Fall of 1993. Back then the old professors or staff members would pontificate about the 'good old days' when they started working here back in the 1970s. And of course I'd chuckle and say, "Hey I wasn't even born yet!". To which they'd sardonically reply, "Haha...you just wait, you'll get there." It seemed so far away back then. And now, next year's incoming freshman will have been born likely in the year I started working here. Most of them won't have existed when I was an undergrad. When did I get old?

These days I've noticed that I've slowed down a little. I used to move through the hallways with such purpose, always seemingly in a hurry to get to the next task. You might be tempted to think that I'm slowing down because of my age; but really, I CAN still move with that purpose, when it suits me. I think, really, I'm slowing down just because of a lack of motivation. A lack of drive. When you spend, now 36 semesters basically doing the same thing year after year after year, and fighting against the same institutional bureaucracy, I guess it wears you down. I simply just don't care to get things done as quickly as I used to. Why should I? What's the point? It's not like I can possible gain anything by doing so. You won't get recognition. You won't see a raise. So I take my time a little more. Why not?

So here I sit, Thursday of finals week, getting ready to start filling out the piles of (now electronic) paperwork to submit to Space Management for our fall events. I'm actually using my computer monitor from home, because the screen on my 2011 iMac gave out and is now just a grey screen with vertical gradations of color. Mostly pinks and purples. So we bypassed the computer screen to my Samsung monitor. It works. They say they should be able to get me a new computer. By August. In other news, we're scheduled to have a major refurbishment of our elevator this summer, which has been long overdue and will hopefully give us a product that won't be likely to break down (and usually at the most inopportune times). Oh wait, that's been delayed till next year now. Well, we are also looking at finally replacing our stage lighting with LED fixtures, as the current fixtures are so old that you can't even find the bulbs anymore. 30% of our lighting is currently inoperative. That's how bad it's gotten. Oh wait, the university bureaucracy says we have to send it out to bid, even though we have a company ready to come in and do it, and the funding is already approved in place. So that's delayed for who knows how long.

I guess there's no reason really for me to move with a purpose, to finish anything faster. After all, the university isn't.