When our department moved into this building 2(?) years ago a lot of my important things were taken from my office without my knowledge. I don’t want to say “stolen,” but when they moved all of our furniture and belongings over here my PhD sheepskin, a space heater, several important books, and god knows what else just up and disappeared. Uncanny moment when I went over there to pick this stuff up: all the offices on the 7th floor were “gutted”–floors uncovered without furnishings, walls naked as the day they were born. Semi-dreamlike scene.
So the box with all that stuff and the heater were gone, okay. I go to the new office, ask the secretary what happened to it and she asks, “didn’t you know you were supposed to get your stuff out?” Yes, I knew we had to get our stuff out, “but your mail said our stuff would be moved a week later,” I replied. “Oh, that was the date they actually moved everything. Personal effects were supposed to be out before then.” No idea how I was supposed to reply to this, so I just said “look, my important stuff is missing. Could you please ask the movers/cleaning staff where they put the stuff that wasn’t accounted for?” She does this, then calls me the next day. They couldn’t find my shit.
“Well it’s missing, see, so could you ask campus security to look at the surveillance cams to find out who removed my important personal stuff?” Okay, she reluctantly agrees to do it…Next day she calls me back, this time to tell me that the security cams were (conveniently) turned off at the time the movers were doing their thing. Oh, okay, thanks but no thanks!
What pisses me off about all this is that she was behaving as if I had fcuked up, as if my requests to get my stuff back were unreasonable! Slack, but maybe she thought it was my responsibility to track my stuff down…But was it? The Dept./College is my employer and they were in charge of moving our things, so they should also be responsible seeing that it all got moved, I think. Sheesh.