KalahariLog

I am starting to see why every single door in our department here is closed. I am a firm believer that “a closed door is a sign of a closed mind,” (or for an even more elaboration of the closed-door see R. Hamming's excellent Bell Labs Speech) but as a result of my constantly open door I've had too many people of all kinds come into my office. I've had a dapper pair of salesmen come in my office trying to sell me, of all things, Russian electric shavers. It was quite refreshing to see the actual device, about the size of largish hair-dryer, chunky and ugly in a old-communist memorabilia kind of way, packaged in a shiny patently fake leather shoebox-size box. Then I had random people off the street come asking for help with their computer problems, such as, how do you go to the internet, or how do you listen to music with your computer. Incidentally, on my office computer I won't be listening to music anytime soon as it has neither a sound-card nor speakers.

Another type of visitor was an engineering student, who wanted me to write a program for him. I couldn't quite understand what he wanted for a while until I finally got it. He was assigned a programming homework; he doesn't know how to program; he knows there is a computer science department; he concluded that somebody at the computer science department should write his program for him. It turned out that the program needed was a Fahrenheit to Celsius converter which is about as trivial a program to write as possible.

Then there are the people looking for somebody in the department and who seeing the only open door, come and ask. I have had people come in to give me surveys and today I had students collecting money for a conference trip. I am usually good at not yielding to most pitches for money but this one was hard to say no to.

I also have a steady stream of students asking to use my stapler. The rumor must have gotten out that I actually let them do it, but rarely a day goes by without someone coming in for that, and on homework-due-today days I've had dozens. This is fine but I am getting worried as I am running out of my allotment of staples. After I arrived I was given what I assume is the standard office supply package: 1 pencil, 2 pens (red and blue), stapler, 3 sticks of staples (sticks, not boxes), 1 whiteboard eraser, 4 whiteboard markers (blue and black), 1 permanent marker, 1 glue-stick, and blue tack (which is a sticky white goo used to attach papers to surfaces here, instead of, say, sticky-tape). Two months later, I am out of markers, and sticky goo, and nearly out of staples. I went through my supply of sticky goo when posting solutions to homeworks and exams. I was stunned to see what happened: students came to copy the parts that they had missed and there was a group of about 10 students outside my door for about one hour. At the end of the hour, all the solutions were gone, and my door was open all that time. The sticky goo was gone too. One advantage of sticky tape over sticky goo is that ripping out something stuck with tape makes more noise. Since then, I either print the solutions or post them online. Printing is tricky as there is only one 1-sided old HP printer and a copier which is broken more often than the copier in Arizona.