A DAY AT THE OFFICE
Although I was awake at 5 a.m., I
fell asleep again and was woken by the alarm clock at 5.45 a.m., but I usually
wake up before it rings, and turn it off. As is common, I woke up with a
headache. I took my shower, dressed, and left the house at 6 a.m.
The drive to the college is 40 miles
and takes about an hour in the morning when there’s no traffic, a straight road
most of the way down Route 30 (which goes from Astoria, Oregon, to Atlantic
City, via Philadelphia). Almost all my life in New Jersey (since 1975) has been
spent driving up and down Route 30. One day, I must drive it all the way to
Oregon.
There are four McDonalds on the way
to the college, but I like the one nearest the college in Egg Harbor. I arrived
thereat 6.50 a.m. This morning I had a two-for-one coupon (My Dean keeps me fed
with McDonalds’ coupons), and I had the bacon, egg and cheese bagel, with a
senior coffee for $3.68. I like to read there, and I read a cute story about a
high school female athlete in Texas, staying there longer than usual. I got my
free refill of coffee and arrived at the college at 7.30 a.m.
The one-mile drive into the college
is through pine woods. Usually I see deer there, but there were none today. The
sun was a pale silver disc hidden behind low clouds racing by. That last mile
is a pleasure each time I come to the college.
After getting to my office, I opened
the SOBL (Social & Behavioral Sciences) office and had the place to myself.
Except, catastrophe, the Xerox machine was broken and unfixable. I did my
printing (a revision of an article on the Suicide Opinion Questionnaire which
has been accepted by Omega and the cover letter, a chapter for a
festschrift for Ronald Clarke, a former colleague, a draft of a chapter on workplace
violence, the first of a series of letters written by a suicide, and a handout
for my statistics class).
At 8, I panicked because I seemed to
have lost a copyright form. (I eventually found it in the envelope for Omega,
where it was supposed to be.) And then one of my advisees stopped by to check
whether she had registered for the correct courses. I teased her that I am not
supposed to be disturbed before class, but I sat with and checked her courses.
I checked my e-mails and printed the important ones (so much for the paperless
office) and went off to my 8.30 am class on Statistical Methods.
At the end of the class, I gave them a quiz on
permutations and combinations and, while they did it, I typed in scores from a
questionnaire on religiosity that my students had filled out earlier in the
semester. (They are using the data for their SPSS projects.)
I was back in my office at 10.15
a.m. I typed in some data for a study on state measures of irrationality for a
study I’m doing with Bijou, printed some journal articles from online
(including a psychological autopsy study of suicides in Bali). Then I went to
the library to get an interlibrary loan book (for a study one of my students is
planning on Internet addiction) and a book in our library someone had
recommended as relevant to my multiple-self theory of personality.
At 10.45, I wrote an e-mail to Tamas
Zonda in Hungary about a study he wants me to help write up and publish on
panic disorder and suicide, downloaded some data from Ben Park (at Penn State
University) on “reasons for living” that he had collected in South Korea, and
at 11 a.m. broke for lunch (my second bacon, egg and cheese bagel).
At 11.20, I ran some analyses on
incidents of mass murder that I need for my chapter on workplace violence (do
the murderers who commit suicide kill more victims than those who are
arrested?), got my “in press” files to take home to organize, and then
collapsed. I have an old leather chair in my office that a colleague threw out,
and I rested there for half an hour. (I used to have a bed in my office but,
foolishly, I threw it out a few years ago so that I could have more filing
cabinets!)
The Xerox machine was still not
fixed (it was “down” for the rest of the day), and so I did not have much to do.
I attended to e-mails and sneaked some important Xeroxing on other machines. At
12.25, I went off to my 12.30 class on Abnormal Psychology. I was showing a
video on manic-depression and I scored helplessness/hopelessness questionnaires
from students while the video played. Two students would not stop talking. I
hushed them and then threw a blackboard eraser in their general direction –
about three feet from them. The other students laughed, but one of the talkers
claimed to be upset by this! My next class is at 2.30 p.m. (the classes are
each 1 hour and 50 minutes long) on Personality and, as soon as that class
ended, I felt exhausted again and left for home (at 4.15).
It takes longer to get home (with
the traffic), and I arrived at 5.45, fixed myself a margarita and, because
Bijou teaches on Thursday nights, heated a Lean Cuisine frozen dinner. I called
my son (who had called Bijou earlier in the day) and called Alan to tell him
that the movie (Amelia) we want to see has not opened yet.
Most evenings I work a little, but tonight I was
tired. I had the Ole Miss-South Carolina college football game on the
television, I checked and wrote e-mails, I played card games on the PC, and I
worked a little – organized the “in press” files and typed up a handout for my
statistics class, all at the same time – nothing intense.
Bijou arrived home at 10 p.m.
This
semester, I teach only two days (Tuesdays and Thursdays) and, as I get older, I
find it tiring to teach three 2-hour classes each day as well as getting my
printing, xeroxing and data analyses done. But I do like the four-day weekend.
On alternate semesters, I teach Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with shorter
classes and longer breaks between classes, but those days are longer. On
Mondays and Wednesdays, I start teaching at 8.30 a.m. and finish at 5.20 p.m.,
although on Fridays, I am finished teaching at 11.10 a.m. And I have a “normal”
weekend. It’s a toss up which schedule I prefer, so alternating semesters is
probably the best choice.
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