I Can't Trace Time

By Wm. on August 20, 2025

Today is the first day of class at my institution. It's a weird one for me, since, outside of sabbatical terms, it's the first time I'm not going to be in the classroom on day one--both of my classes this semester meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I am currently in the office, though, still serving as department chair for the first couple of years of this phased retirement thing. Also, there's a new member in my department who's enjoying her very first day on the job after finishing her dissertation over the summer--I figure I should be around in case there's something I can do to help things go more smoothly.

It's not just my workload that's different these days. There's been a project in recent years to make the signage in my building uniform. A couple of years ago, they rolled out new nameplates that were placed to the side of, and not on, office doors of faculty and staff. Over the summer, they completed the job by replacing the signage on labs, classrooms, etc.--some original, dating back to the late 60s, plenty not--. This included room numbers, and while they were at it, the powers that be asked us if those of us in the building wanted to change the numbering scheme. For some reason, the three-story Asher Science Center began life with rooms that began with 0, 1, and 2, instead of the more traditional 1, 2, and 3. The faculty in the Science Division voted last year to effectively add 100 to all the room numbers in the building. Thus, after hanging in room 120 since 1993, I'm having to learn to tell students I am now to be found in 220 Asher. (Since the numbers weren't updated in our internal systems until just a few weeks ago, there's a lot of confusion today among new students who are working off class schedules that were printed out earlier in the summer. Just in the last five minutes, I've had two students come by looking for their chemistry class, which is being held upstairs in the room formerly known as 219.)

The not-so-high quality picture at the top was taken sometime in my early days on the job, circa 1994 (that looks to be a homework key and my weekly schedule taped to the door). They were still doing name plates for office doors in-house at the time, I believe, and mine looked just like those of all my colleagues in the building. Here's what I have outside my office today.

It wasn't too many years after I arrived that name plates for new faculty began not looking like the others. By 2012, I was in my first term as department chair, and I decided to spend some of our annual budget that year on plates for the nine folks in math, physics, and computer science who comprised our department. Black with white lettering, two adhesive strips on the back for easy application. It was part of my efforts back then to increase pride of place.

But it wasn't long afterwards that things began crumbling on my floor. A terrible recruiting year led to significant financial strain. Our newest hire was let go, another young colleague departed, and the administration elected to pursue terminating our major in computer science. Within three years, we were down to six people. I took the time to scrape those plates off doors as folks disappeared. By the end of the decade, our remaining CS colleague left for an industry job and two others retired. Scrape, scrape, scrape. Even with these brand new plates, the three of still remaining had those black ones on our doors until a couple of weeks ago.

I came in one afternoon earlier this month to find mine gone, with only the adhesive left behind (the new numbers had been put up earlier that day, with red dots stuck on old signage to be removed). I found it in a garbage can in the physics lab across the hall; that evening I came back and scraped the other two, since those hadn't been removed yet. They're stored in my office in case my colleagues want them. I also pried off the 120 from my door.

As if that weren't enough, my college has spent the summer updating its phone system. We've been told that the voicemail we've saved over the years isn't being ported over, so I'm trying to get messages that go back as far as the spring of '95, when Martha and I had just started dating, emailed to me as .wav files. It's not been as smooth a process as I'd like, but our IT folks are working with me to find a solution. I'm hoping that by the end of today that will be fully addressed.

Turn and face the strange, indeed.