Life at the university

I've now been at the university 4 1/2 months, and I'm happy to say I still like my job.

I thought I would share some random stories from colleagues, students, and random situations.

One day I ate lunch with a colleague who will retire next year. She said when she started working at 18 (then for the Rectorat, she moved to the university later) one of her jobs was to type up the exam questions for the Bac. To prevent one single secretary from knowing an entire Bac subject, they would type a subject for 5 minutes, then the boss would blow a whistle, and everyone would change typewriter and continue typing a different subject. At the end of the day everyone had to bring the ink ribbon to the boss's office and it was locked up. Why? Because if you pulled out the ribbon you could see what someone had typed!

This past semester, there was a Chinese Erasmus student who was "out-there", as in "your spaceship's double parked". She invited herself to the ropes course day, came by my office one day asking "Who were those ladies yesterday who gave the presentation? They had black jackets." (Note, it was the internship fair the previous day, so it could have been anyone!) She took pictures with flash of some of the professors while they were teaching, and I had to send her an email explaining that this wasn't looked kindly upon in France (need to ask permission first). And when she was absent from class for more than a week I sent an email asking if everything was okay (but I never got a response...). Everyone who knew her kind of laughed at how spacey she was, so I was really surprised today when she came by my office to give me a gift! She gave me a nice metal book mark, and it was a really nice gesture.

And last story:
A professor was in my office talking about random things, when he somehow got on the subject of dancing. He remembered that another professor is a great tango dancer, and who should go strolling down the hallway, but said professor! He was invited into the office, and for 15 minutes he told us about the great places to do Tango in Toulouse, the incredibly tall Danish woman he danced with in Buenos Aires, and and the gay Tango bars in Argentina. Then he made us watch a Youtube video of a famous Tango couple, of which the female dancer recently died in a car accident. After this 30-40 minute interlude, we finally got back to work. This dancing professor apparently has a bit of a reputation though with my colleagues, because some of them were talking about his infidelities and his way of hitting on women. One of my colleagues even said he once said to her "You know, there's little chance you'll be married to your husband for your entire life." Talk about subtle!