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When I started my job here at the Graduate College, they gave me a tour of the office. My boss was pretty proud of their digs, as they’d just moved to a new location within the last couple of weeks. They look really nice, too: they’re decorated simply, predominantly in white and shades of gray, with cyclone red as an accent. The offices have glass walls (intermittently occluded with vertical white opaque and semi-opaque strips). Etc etc pretty pretty.

She ushered me into this one room that had rows upon rows of filing cabinets along one wall. Apparently they normally have a giant machine for storing student records in a smaller space, but it wasn’t working properly, so they moved all the student records into old-school filing cabinets. Those cabinets, she said, represented the paperwork on every graduate student at ISU. I was suitably impressed. I scanned them briefly to figure out where I’d be in that mess of paperwork. I saw they were organized alphabetically (an excellent choice on their part, I’m sure) by the first three letters of the last name: A – Auh, Auk – Ber, and so on. I had almost found my name when I got distracted. A third of the way through, right at eye level, I saw the following:

Die – Fag

Now, I understand that this is a temporary solution and all, but seriously, was I the first to notice? The placards on the drawers were hand-written. How could somebody miss that? Or worse, what does it say about me that I noticed? Couldn’t they have moved one file in either direction to make it say something else? Die – Fam or Dib – Fag wouldn’t be nearly as humorous, for instance (course, I still would’ve snickered at either Did – Fag or Dic – Fag). I spent the rest of the day (and every time I walk past that office since) trying very, very hard not to burst out laughing in front of my boss. Anywhere else, such a sign would have royally pissed me off. Here, it’s so completely innocuous and out of place that it’s just plain funny. It’s still my favorite sign in the office, and I’m hoping to get a picture of it before it goes away.