cake and punch

Our secretary is retiring.

While I am very happy for her, getting to have time to enjoy her new grandson and pursue her various hobbies, she's going to leave a giant hole in the department, because she had been here longer than nearly all of us, and she knew everything, and she also knows all the ins and outs of how to get things done efficiently in the university bureaucracy.

We had a small reception for her today (Last night, we took her and her family out to dinner at the local good Italian place). There was cake and punch.

I provided the punchbowl. It amuses me that I, one of the younger members of the faculty and one of only two never-marrieds, am apparently the only person who owns a punchbowl (well, it's not like I'd expect the departmental bachelor to own one, but still). It's an older version, probably early 60s. I got it at one of the antique shops in this area. And no, I almost never use it.

Anyway, whenever there's cake, I always think of that scene from Office Space where Milton Waddams is so concerned (SO CONCERNED) he's not going to get his cake. (And if there had been a lot of people there? I would have hung back and not taken cake. Because I don't really need it, and if there were people who walked over from other departments...)

Anyway, I just walked down there (it ended at 3) to retrieve my punchbowl. There was still cake. So I stopped off in the office of one of my colleagues and commented, "Apparently the ratio of people to cake was not too high." And she got it, and she laughed. Which is one of the reasons why I like working here.