The building where my office is is one of those 60’s era brick buildings with lots of basically identical little offices arranged along indistinguishable hallways. Tenured professors are known to get lost in there trying to find specific offices. To make it a little easier, some of us decorate our doors:
The key identifying the numbered items is below the fold, but as this is a fairly general phenomenon in academia, I thought I’d try making this a Bonus Photo Edition Dorky Poll:
What’s on your office door?
(If you don’t have your own office, then what’s decorating your workspace? If you’re not the type to add any individuality to the space where you work, well, what are you doing reading blogs? Shouldn’t you be working?)
Leave a short description or a link to a picture in the comments. (If you leave a link, there’s a chance that your comment will get held for moderation, which may be a longer delay than usual, as I’m going to be busy today, and not in my office to clear comments. I’ll get to it as soon as I can, though.)
The stuff on my door:
- “Fear the Turtle” sign. It’s a Maryland thing, you wouldn’t understand.
- Ally sign. This is a sign indicating that I attended a LGBT Ally training session a little while back. It basically amounts to a pledge that I won’t be a dick to any lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered students who come to my office with problems related to their sexuality.
- My name in katakana. It was part of the bilingual name signs they gave out at Worldcon, and I like the way it looks.
- Tickets from the 2003 East Regional Finals in Albany. The two games that Syracuse won to get to the Final Four, the year they won the title.
- Fortune cookie fortune. It says “All of your hard work will soon pay off.” I got it about a month before my tenure process started, and it seemed like a good omen.
- Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. Four of them, clustered around the name plate. It’s one of the two best syndicated comic strips ever.
- Picture of Emmy. How could I not display a picture of the Queen of Niskayuna?
- Directions to my lab. If I’m not in my office, that’s the next place to look for me.
- xkcd comic. It’s the one about complex exponentials.
- Article about the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics. I don’t update this stuff all that often…
- Ph.D. comic. The one about “Desk Entropy.”
- Dilbert comic. “How about a nanotechnology stem cell for fighting terrorists?”
- Sluggy Freelance comics. Kiki poinging around Riff’s lab.
- ESPN Page 2 printout. It’s the bit of this article about the Ph.D. defense, which is one of the best descriptions of the defense process I’ve ever read.
I’m sure that the psychologists whose lab is just down the hall could have a field day analyzing what this says about me, but it amuses me.