It's not about the paper towels

I'm standing in a meeting room pressing the power button to start the projector but it isn't coming on so I press it again, and again, and again, until finally I realize that the reason the projector won't come on is that it isn't there. It's gone! Vanished! Elvis has left the building!

We managed the meeting without the projector, but it's not the only absence making itself known on campus. Earlier I'd stood in the ladies' room in the library staring at an empty paper-towel dispenser and running through options. I can't replace paper towels myself because mere faculty members aren't trusted with keys to the supply closets, nor are we trained on how to open those pesky dispensers. After recent purges of positions and shifts in responsibilities, I have no idea whom to notify about an absence of paper towels, or a leaky roof, or a pool of spilled coffee on the stairs. All over campus department chairs are scrambling to delegate tasks formerly completed by our hard-working administrative assistants, but now it's hard to know who will manage bulletin boards and budgets, collect departmental mail, or reserve rooms. 

That last item may seem small but faculty members can get very protective of our spaces. There are classrooms in which I refuse to teach because I prefer whiteboards to blackboards (chalk dust makes me sneeze), and I don't like rooms with tripping hazards (because I have fallen on my face in front of students before and I don't ever care to repeat the exercise), and rooms without windows make me nervous. (I'm claustrophobic. Deal with it.) Every time we hire a new admin assistant, I have to educate her about room preferences, and I'm sure other faculty members do the same, which is one reason being a departmental admin assistant is a horrible job. 

But in the absence of administrative assistants, I don't even know who is responsible for assigning classrooms. Last year the College bought a piece of furniture at my request so I could use it in a particular classroom, but this semester I'm scheduled to teach in a different room--an interior room without windows, a room too small for the number of students, and, worst of all, a room so suffused with mechanical noise that I can barely hear myself speak in there. I would love to shift to a different room, but instead of having a calm chat with an admin assistant, I'll be wandering around campus hoping to randomly run into whoever is responsible for easing my pain.

And along the way I'll run into other wanderers seeking the Paper Towel Czar or the Orderer of Dry-Erase Markers or the Printer Un-Jammer or whatever you call the one person who is permitted to open the electrical box and press "reset" after a space heater pops the circuit-breaker. We are hard-working people who are willing to do whatever we can, but who will do the things we can't?