Dust, rust, dirt, and noise

My campus right now is a great place to be if you're a fan of dust, rust, dirt, and noise. In my building, brilliant blue tape lends a festive touch to doors, the better to keep the dust off the freshly-waxed floors of classrooms vacant until spring semester starts. Dust from plaster and pulverized stone hangs in the air and creeps into computers, coffeepots, and photocopiers, interfering with my ability to do my job.

While the dust appears where it doesn't belong, huge holes in the walls open up to make way for elevator installation. It's not a particularly quiet job, but it's no noisier than, say, having someone beating on my door with a baseball bat all day every day. I wouldn't trade jobs with the elevator installers, who had to do some excavating downstairs to make room for the elevator shaft but found that, in the absence of an elevator, there really wasn't any good way to haul all that dirt up the stairs and out of the building except by carrying it out in buckets.

Compared to that, carrying my laptop computer across campus every day is a piece of cake. I'm teaching my J-term class in another building, where, theoretically, we won't be bothered by dust and noise, except that the custodians are cleaning all the floors in the building with equipment that sounds like they're running a car wash in the hallway--and besides, the building is just across from the construction site for the new library, where huge steel girders are being brought together all day long with no more noise than you'd hear if they were dropping college vans off the roof of the rec center.

I worry about how orange those beams look: are we supposed to build with rusty beams? But fortunately, I'm not responsible for supervising the purveyors of dust, rust, dirt, and noise. Let someone else make the tough decisions, and I'll do my part simply by sitting back and griping.