It's too early to tell whether this will be a horrible day or not, but I'm knee deep in a horrible work scenario.
I work at this art school and during the summer it's my job to throw out the stuff of all the students who have abandoned their studios or cubicles. This means throwing out personal affects, food, art, the whole shebang. In order to do this, I have to sort of brainwash myself, because my usual impulse is to never throw anything out. I have to just be like "It's a dirty job, but it's my job. These kids need to take care of their stuff. I gotta teach them a lesson..." Crap like that. I've never had a job with actual power or "responsibility" before, so this is all an adjustment. Anyway, Apparently my self-brainwashing somehow convinced me that I needed to cut the locks on all these storage cabinets that the students had stuff in (It's a long story--I had a few decent reasons for this) -- and also convinced myself that allt hese students had been told that they could not store stuff in these cabinets over the summer. So me and my assistant sucked it up, cut all these locks, threw out photos, portfolios, notebooks, etc. Then we found computers--that's funny. Okay, I can see leaving an old notebook, but a G5computer? That's crazy. Well, thank God I didn't throw out any computers, but I did throw out most of the other stuff. Then there was a whole other room full of lockers with locks, all of which we cut, and then we realized that there were WAY too many people storing stuff in those things for it to be a normal occurence for it all to get dumped. We thankfully held on to a bunch of this stuff. I called the guy who had the job before me to ask what the protocol was with these storage units. No call back. We put some of the stuff in a storage room, but about 5 or 6 students had all of their shit thrown out by me and my trusty assistant, who for some reason repeatedly assured me that they did this last year when he worked for my predecessor. Wouldn't you know, I run into the predecessor at a bar this weekend, I ask him about the storage units, and he's like "No, you don't cut those! The students are allowed to store stuff in there for the summer." Wait, whuuuuuuuut? Buzzkill is not the word. I already felt like a creep throwing stuff out that I thought was meant to be thrown out, now I find out I threw out portfolios, books, etc. belonging to people who were told they could store stuff there?? Then I came back to work this morning, checked the info packets I sent out to the students, and there it is "you can store stuff in the storage units under your desk". Effectively I told them they could store stuff there, and I didn't just double check my own paper work before trashing people's desks. So now I've just told my supervisor, who is thankfully sympathetic, but I"m just waiting for the shitstorm from students and faculty about it. The best part is I personally feel terrible and guilty about the whole thing, as it is a real-life version of what would be a nightmare scenario when I was a college student. Ugh.
