ONE THOUSAND SOBER TRUTHS or "There's a Hole in My Beckett"

by Rebel Girl (always sober, generally peevish)

“The lie which elates us is dearer than a thousand sober truths.”

—Pushkin


A thousand sober truths is work-in-progress—and we welcome your contributions. We begin with the first baker’s dozen: doors, telephones, floors, furniture, undergarments—and yes, more tiny livestock. Moo.

Please note that readers can now “comment” by clicking “comments” at the end of the entry and, yes, if one wishes, one can comment anonymously. (Whew!) Or else, one can always forward sober truths to any of our reporters.

For origins of the sober truths, see “Mouseberries":

http://dissenttheblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/mouseberries-by-rebel-girl.html

(So far, all contributions reference IVC.)

ONE THOUSAND SOBER TRUTHS:


1) The automatic door opening device (the one allowing differently-abled people to access easily) on the A-200 building has been broken (at least) since the beginning of the semester (late August). Every day, I press it and every day it declines to open the door. Now, it might be observed that this is the only door equipped with this device in the A-200 building. I suppose those who need to use it to access the building are forced to rely, like Blanche Dubois, on the kindness of strangers. Fortunately there are plenty of kind souls in the A-200 building. Violation of the American with Disabilities Act? Simply an oversight? An unwitting homage to “A Streetcar Named Desire”? (UPDATE: the automatic door operating device was finally fixed the week of October 10 – whew!)

2) Major Tom to Ground Control. During the first week of classes, all phone calls to the campus operator were seemingly redirected out into space or, perhaps, to La Habra, or say, Belgrade or Belfast, and people were left on hold for upwards of 35 minutes. This was documented, once by an employee who, having dialed the front desk and received no pick up, just ring after ring after ring, walked with the ringing cel phone to the front desk only to be told by the substitute there that the operator’s telephone wasn’t ringing at all because it was automatically forwarded!

3) The person who meant to sit at the (new!) information desk in the Student Services Center to help redirect people when offices are closed doesn't begin working until 9:00--when all the other offices open up anyway. Hmmm.

4) Victoria's Secret? Classrooms are "outfitted" with torn underwear, bathrobes, and various other items of often intimate apparel serving as rags to erase perennially dirty white boards!

5) Sources say that televised meetings of the Board of Trustees are "edited" to remove trustees' angry faces and outbursts.

6) IVC map boards. Designers failed to recognize that the plexiglass holders, tilted at a perfect angle to cook in the So Cal sun all day, will fade the already pale maps of IVC before you can say “midterm”! Why the designers can’t learn what the legions of Eagle Scouts who produce this kind of project on a regular basis know leaves me puzzled. (UPDATE: new map boards appear to be under construction. Wait and see.)

7) Podia. One podium currently in use has a bite out of it. Really. (Check it out in A-202!) Others tilt more than the leaning tower of Pisa. One was once repaired by the students themselves (there’s initiative for you!). Others fail to hold books, lecture notes. Some disappear entirely leaving a crop circle-like shadow on the floor.

8) Holes in classroom ceilings which attract tiny livestock. Perhaps the livestock feed on the podia when class is not in session.

9) The collection of broken, breaking, abandoned and stained furniture in the so-called “lounge” in A-200 – suitable, perhaps for that production of “Waiting for Godot” that Susan Sontag staged in Sarajevo at the height of the war but a bit disconcerting to find in use at a community college. What message is the college trying to send to the folks who visit? Read more Beckett?

10) Those $500 telephones that now sparkle in every classroom (I may not have a podium—and the faculty lounge may host—publicly—the kind of furniture one expects to find in flop houses or wartime theater—but my classroom does have a telephone that, with its jet-pack good looks, makes me imagine that it can fly.) While I am all for some kind of communication system with the outside world, these particular models offer more bang than required for mundane classroom use. I hear students enjoy them, though, as often these landlines offer better reception than the students’ own cell phones. Me, I’d rather have a sturdy podium, batteries for the wall clock, a mousetrap or two, and maybe an old-fashioned wall phone that connects immediately to campus security. Or, perhaps, the cell phone number of the chief of campus security. (Ah, wish granted this week—I now have the cell phone number for the campus security chief. Ring-a-ding.)


11) Portable or temporary classrooms nearly as old as the students who sit in them. One of my students was born in 1989. At least these classrooms do provide shelter for the youthful rodents and tiny livestock who reside beneath them. Next time you stroll to your portable classroom, make the rounds of the perimeter and check out the digs. Note the cute rounded archways of the mouse holes, just like in the cartoons! See the rodents and bunnies busily at work. Marvel at the size of one particular gap under the steps of those far flung CEC buildings (CEC 5? CEC 6? You know, the ones out near the pumpkin patch) and imagine what kind of creature crawls in there at night!

12) A-203 (nickname: “fishbowl”), a dreary but often a prized classroom nonetheless by faculty who utilize small group work, received “new” chairs last year—large, almost-impossible-to-move blue chairs that dwarf the tables and crowd the already small quarters. Rumor has it that these chairs were “freebies” or “promotional items”—the gist being that somehow they were a deal and we were lucky to get ‘em. All was fine with the chairs, except, of course for the extreme immobility part and the crowded floor plan—just ask students with access issues or even a faculty member with lots of equipment. Then, during the course of summer, the carpeting was removed and replaced by linoleum, and now the floor, two months into the fall semester, is a Jackson Pollock-like kinetic design of black scrawls—disturbing, strangely compelling, and plainly publicly filthy. (Note: Pollock isn’t filthy—he’s a genius—but the A-203 floor is.)

13) B-104 has missing ceiling tiles, and has for years. Every rainy season there is a major leak in that area of the roof. The seemingly long-term solution appears to be this: once the first storm of the season arrives, a large trash barrel is placed in the middle of the room to catch the water. Perhaps this saves money that would otherwise be spent on roof repair and ceiling tiles. Fiscal conservatives, rejoice: join hands and dance around the plastic barrel. Besides, the trash barrel and the rain adds a special something to the classroom: namely a kind of industrial bleakness and dread, a Home Depot kind of despair, and the dependable plunk-plunk-plunk inspires more of the existential drama evocative of the late Irish playwright Beckett.

Ah, the theater.

—That’s all for now, folks. Stay dry. —Rebel Girl