bursts in through the closed door
“Oh my God, OP, you’re not going to believe this: THE DOG REVOLUTION SET THE BUILDING ON FIRE AFTER BRINGING COFFEE!”
One of the best things about my job is that our clinic’s offices share a hallway with the hospital’s charitable organization, and they have two golden lab “therapy dogs”.
A lot of the clinicians keep dog treats in our offices and once or twice a day the doggos will politely paw at people’s doors for treats and pets time. They are by far my favorite co-workers.
I used to work for a private air cargo company and at the time they were renting space from a private jet operator. The owners daughter worked out of the second floor office and brought her mixed breed dog with her everyday. The highlight of our day was when Olive would come down for a bathroom break or a walk and would stop by our office for pets and the “secret” treat. I don’t miss the job, but I do miss the Olive.
But at least now I mostly work from home so I get to spend every night with my golden snoring like a lumberjack behind me. She’s become so well known that during some meetings I’m asked to switch from the headset to speakers so they can say hello to her.
Tbh, not a lot of training required. They are really treat/love motivated.
Dissertation? This grad student has his own personal office? With a door? I wasn’t even issued a chair. I had to get my own.
As for dogs: when I was in grad school, one of the professors had a dog that sat quietly next to his desk all day, at least as far as the professor knew. When he went to the bathroom, his dog would run into the hall and play with people, but the dog was listening for his footsteps and was always back in his office in time. This didn’t last long because the department head didn’t like dogs and complained :(
I’m doing my PhD in Germany, everyone here is employed with salary and has a 1-3 people office. At least in computer science.
I did a science PhD so I also got paid, enough to live modestly but comfortably. I shared an office with four other people but it was a big office. The incident with the chair probably had more to do with the struggle between the professors and the university to avoid paying for things like that than it did with an absolute lack of funds.
All of the grad students in my department - ten or twelve? - along with the few undergrads we had assisting our program - had to share a single medium-sized room, with no assigned seating. At least they had shared computers at every other seat. Sadly, I don’t recall the chair situation.
When I started my phd (in a different country, during late covid times) my only collegue who would have sat in my room always worked from home. It wasn’t very fun at all. Well, very few people came to the office anyways, so I just had to try and figure out everything by myself, eat lunch alone, etc. etc.
I am so much happier now in a 4 person room where I have 1-3 collegues to talk to depending on the day.
Having a private office would be a nice symbol of status but I don’t think I’d actually enjoy working in one - in grad school, I was really happy in my shared office since the other guys there were my friends. I graduated a year after them and that last year was not fun. Of course new people took their spots but those people were strangers to me.
I have an office at my university but we had to apply for it and only get it for two years. It’s pretty nice, maybe 7x7 with a desk, chair, and bookshelves.
Jesus christ, 7x7? I got my bachelor’s , did the things you’re supposed to do, and when I found out what that life was like, I quit and became a forklift operator at a union job making more money, with better co-workers and less stress. I have little to no structure or micro-managing, don’t feel caged, I’m given the freedom and trust to manage myself, don’t deal with inane BS like meetings that have nothing to do with me, no stress whatsoever, when I leave those doors, im a free man. It infuriates me that I’m still paying for that bullshit paper that I’m not using, simply because older family members said I had to. Fuck.
After the boomers, none of us really stood a chance at fixing things, because we were raised by broken people. Broken people break other people in different ways than they were broken. That generation (as a whole, I know I’m generalizing, which is bad, I recognize there are a lot of amazing boomer parents and otherwise good influences) but in my personal experience, I’ve had FAR more friction with boomers than any other generation, by a VERY wide margin. It happens to such a degree that I sometimes question if I’m the problem. Then I get yelled at by some fat, bald guy with a goatee while I’m walking my dog, for him smelling the flowers around a tree between the road and sidewalk. Which is city property. Also, he always poops and pees before we go for the walk, so that wasn’t an issue either. This guy was just a dickhead trying to assert some kind of power because he was unhappy in life. I’ll give you one guess which flag he actually had ABOVE the American flag. That was before the election. The flag is now gone, but… I know where it was.
Holy shit I went off on a tangent lol. My apologies for my rant. The axe never remembers, the tree never forgets.
Could be that you think he meant 7x7m while he was talking about 7x7ft, quite a difference
How do you get the impression that this is a grad student?
Your comment does remind me of the time I visited a CS grad student at a local university for some programming tutoring in the mid-90s. He had an office! It was about the size of a closet, but there was a door and everything.
How do you get the impression that this is a grad student?
He’s working on his dissertation.
Now that I think about it some more, I do recall seeing places where grad students did have their own personal closets…
How do you get the impression that they are working on their dissertation?
Dog should be top priority.
You know when there’s a dog in the office they just write off the whole day as a productivity loss.
Urgent doggies in office updaters rejoicing
