I guess it's maintenance-day here.

We have had NO air conditioning (or insufficient air-conditioning) in my office building essentially since we moved here.

Well, this morning a big giant truck pulled up with a new industrial ac unit on it. They took the old one (which in fact looks 1970s vintage - it has that odd greenish paint on it that used to be used in some industrial applications) off. It's sweltering in here right now because the ventilation is totally off. And I dastn't open my window as the big (diesel) truck is loitering with its engine on outside.

The old unit is scary looking - the intakes are totally crusted over. I wonder if that was part of the source of the migraines and coughs and general illness in my department these past couple years.

So they're slowly changing it out for a shiny new unit that's still sitting on the truck.

so it's 30* C in here, according to my little thermometer that I swiped from the Ecology labroom.

But at least we should soon have cool air. And perhaps cool air with less of a load of pathogens/pulverized cottonwood fluff/fungal spores/nasty microbial hoo-has from bird droppings/whatever else was embedded on the intakes of that old, old unit.

I've also spent the morning wandering the halls and kibitzing with anyone who doesn't wave me away, or look busy on the phone and with grading - you see, they couldn't hook my computer up to the printers yesterday, so they just left with it unhooked up. (And didn't tell me. I don't know if they thought I wouldn't find out, or what?)

So I called and yet another Smiley Computer Guy came over and labored over my machine, in the heat, for over an hour. But now it will print*. And he has promised to send someone back this afternoon to re-install the analysis package I'm supposed to have.

(*it took a long time because the printers in this department are oooooolllllld, and because they've been abused by lots of different people, and also we have a partial ethernet set up for some of the security stuff on campus, and apparently the security ethernet sometimes interferes with the printer IP addresses...so it's very complicated. I would argue the solution is to get each faculty their own, non-networked printer but I know that would cost too much)