I was poking around over at the University of Venus and found a discussion about where faculty ‘hid’ on campus, when they needed to get some work done without interruption.
On my current campus, I don’t have a hideyhole. The discussion got me thinking, though, about the hideyholes I had as a student. I hid everywhere — from the obvious (library carrels, the research museum) to the extreme (behind the gas cylinders in the gas chromatograph room, at one particularly fraught period). On shipboard, I hid up on the flying bridge and watched plankton with binoculars. A group of us hid in the biochemistry classroom, though as we were playing guitars we were probably not as covert as we supposed.
Most of my current students hide so well that I have not come across them. One laid claim to part of the only between-buildings tunnel on campus last finals week — a dark and scary spot, which my physiology students have used to do experiments on the sympathetic system.
Anyway, hiding out. At one of my almas mater, the student newspaper ran a comic strip about a student who got lost while hiding out in the basement of the Zoology building, and had to survive for years on a diet of lab rats and Xenopus. So, thinking of all these things, I began to wonder what might happen to a student who sought a hideyhole in the basement of the Royal Academy, where they have the live specimens’ floor of the Natural Magic Museum and the pentarium for summoning demons.
So, where did you hide out as a student or where do you hide out now? What monsters are, or were, in your institution’s basement? What monsters would you like to have down there?
I take “in-office sabbaticals” occasionally. The rules are: no answering the phone, no answering e-mail, no answering knocks on the door. Allowed: checking icanhascheezburger.com, political blogs, movie trailers. The minute I do some work (print an e-mail, look at my calendar) the sabbatical ends. Snow helps.
Hmm — I’m wondering which of my characters would be most likely to do that. Most of the Demonologists are total workaholics, I’m afraid!
However, I bet some of the folks over in Zoomancy keep animal cam feeds up on their desktops, the way I do with the hummingbird nest cam (I can’t use the owl box cam because the owls keep having loud sex on screen…) Only in my world, they could be watching a phoenix colony, or checking on griffins or dragons. I’d hate to be the person who had to maintain that camera!